Passing shows race need not rest on visible physical features

Evidence

The Afrocentrist scholar Molefi Kete Asante took an example quite similar to the one Mary Waters analyzed in order to argue against a racially mixed identity in America: to claim, for example, a partly German heritage for black Americans, he writes, may be “a correct statement of biological history but is of no practical value in the American political and social context. There is neither a political nor a social definition within the American society for such a masquerade” (Asante, 1993:142). What Waters describes as a social norm, Asante tries to enforce by considering a person’s real ancestry “of no practical value” for identification, and the claiming of a parent’s ethnicity merely a “masquerade.” Those types of ancestry that are colloquially associated in the United States with the term “race” rather than “ethnicity” may deny a descendant the legitimate possibility of identifying with certain other forms of his or her ancestry (even though “ancestry” may mean one parent, three grandparents, or an even higher proportion of ancestors further removed). The social phenomenon of “passing” also throws into question the notion that “race” rests on “physical” features or that such features are visible - since “passing” implies that people who “look white” may be considered to be “really” black (see Davis, 1991). From a stronger theoretical probing of the issue of “mixed race” the concept of “race” as a “physically based” ethnic distinction may be fundamentally questioned, as Naomi Zack (1993) demonstrates. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 717

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges the physical-criteria definition of race found in many vault definitions; supports reading race as socially black-boxed rather than phenotype-based. — connects to: Racism operates through visual regimes while hybridity exceeds visual capture; Visible phenotype is not required for a group to become racialized — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 526
• QUESTION: Tension between Asante’s Afrocentric position and Waters’ descriptive account of the same phenomenon is worth chasing — the same descent rule read as either natural constraint or political enforcement.

Broader Connections

• Visible phenotype is not required for a group to become racialized #corroborates (0.85) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 526
• Racism operates through visual regimes while hybridity exceeds visual capture #expands (0.75)