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Drawing on interview data with black-white biracial adults, we examine the considerable agency most have in asserting their racial identities to others. Extending research on "identity work" (Snow and Anderson 1987), we explore the strategies biracial people use to conceal (i.e., pass), cover, and/or accent aspects of their racial ancestries, and the individual and structural-level factors that limit the accessibility and/or effectiveness of some strategies. We further find that how these biracial respondents identify is often contextual-most identify as biracial, but in some contexts, they pass as monoracial. Scholars argue that passing may be a relic of the past, yet we find that passing still occurs today. Most notably, we find a striking reverse pattern of passing today-while passing during the Jim Crow era involved passing as white, these respondents more often report passing as black today. Motivations for identity work are explored, with an emphasis on passing as black.
Keywords: passing, identity work, biracial, multiracial, identity
My father has sixteen brothers and sisters and ... a lot of them used to pass as white ... I mean it's easier if you can go to any movie theater you want. [A] few of my aunts told me about a place they used to go to and eat all the time that was "whites only" . . . they did it as a joke . . . they did it because they wanted to show how stupid [segregation] was. -Olivia, age 45
Until relatively recently, few racial options have been available to multiracial people - especially those with black ancestry. The one-drop rule, rooted in slavery and Jim Crow segregation, defined multiracial people with any drop of black blood as black (Davis 1991). Just like their monoracial black counterparts, they had few, if any, rights (e.g., they were enslaved, they could not vote, they were restricted from many public facilities). According to Daniel (1992), "Multiracial individuals for the most part have accepted the racial status quo, and have identified themselves as Black. A significant number of individuals, however, have chosen the path of resistance . . . Individual resistance has taken the form primarily of 'passing'" as white (91). Like Olivia's aunts (described above), many Americans passed as white to resist the racially restrictive one-drop...