I think to begin to understand the phenomenon of passing you have to appreciate the consequences of being black in America. In my own family, even living in the New York City, my aunt (who couldn’t pass for white) was told by the state employment office that they had no jobs for colored girls. My grandfather had to pass for white to join the carpenter’s union, which in New York state was still segregated as late as 1959. My grandmother had to pass as white in order to get a job ironing clothes in a laundrymat. Being white was seen as a matter of economic survival. Of course there are lots of examples of black men and women who managed to succeed despite Jim Crow and discrimination. And so people who crosssed the color line did so simply to benefit themselves or because they’d adopted the attitudes at large that to be black was to be inferior.

In One Drop, I noted “In 1958, Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist at Ohio State University, published his findings in the Ohio Journal of Science about the frequency of black-to-white passing. After analyzing decades of census records and fertility data, he estimated that by 1950 one in five Americans who identified themselves as white had some African ancestry. And he predicted that the percentage of white people with black ancestry would increase as these individuals went on to have children.”

As genealogical records become more available online, as DNA tests become more accurate and affordable, finding out that you too have some unknown heritage could be as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard, a quick swab of your cheek. The longer a person’s family has been in this country, the higher the chances… Are you mixed too?

Eventually, at graduate school in Charlottesville, Virginia and afterward in New York City, and through my work on One Drop (a book about my father’s and my racial heritage), I started meeting people with whom I could have this conversation.  Some of these folks were white; most were black or mixed or in some way “other.”  Initially these conversations were often awkward.  I worried about unwittingly saying something ignorant or racist, about making a mistake.  And I made some big ones. 

The worst was a few years ago, when I was still knee-deep in work on One Drop.  I attended a book party for a friend whose father-in-law had been a member of the Clinton Administration.  I had another event that night, so I went early and alone.  Although it was already crowded when I arrived, I didn’t know anyone there.  I found myself standing next to the assistant of my friend’s father who pointed out the various politicos in the room. 

“And there’s David Dinkins,” she said, pointing across the crowded room.  That morning I had just visited with my father’s sister, my aunt Shirley, whom I’d gotten to know after my father died.  I’d never had a chance to meet her husband, the civil rights activist, since he’d passed away a few months before my father, but I’d heard a lot about him—how he was the head of the Western division of the NAACP in the 1950s and how he served as the ambassador to Ghana during the 1960s. My aunt had just been telling me that Bishop Desmond Tutu, Bill Moyers, and then Mayor David Dinkins had all spoken at her husband’s funeral. 

Above a sea of suits and a hundred dollar haircuts, I spotted a tall handsome gray-haired broad-shouldered black man.  I decided impulsively to introduce myself.  Since I’d moved to New York in 1996, I hadn’t lived here when Dinkins was Mayor, so I couldn’t quite recall what he looked like, but this man did look very familiar…

Because it was Vernon Jordan.  Luckily, I didn’t address him by name since I couldn’t decide whether to use Mr. Dinkins or Mayor Dinkins.  I sent my regards from my aunt, Franklin Williams’ widow, and Jordan (who I’m sure knew my uncle too) asked how Shirley was doing.  I started to say something about we’d just been talking about Frank’s funeral when a slightly knitting of Jordan’s brows made me realize my mistake.  I quickly moved on, letting him continue his glad-handing through the crowd.   

Fleeing to the bar, I bumped into someone I vaguely knew and blurted out my error.  As best as I can figure it, he then told someone he knew at New York Magazine who tracked me down a few days later to confirm it.   She wrote it up for the Intelligencer column in this piece titled “Ignorance is Bliss.”  (Isn’t that clever and original?) 

In retrospect I almost felt bad for the reporter: Bill Clinton was at this party; was my case of mistaken identity really the best she could do?  But in the moment, I was mortified and humiliated, but I was also angry.  I blame this attitude—treating racial understanding like a test that can be either passed or failed—for scaring so many people into silence or their entrenched positions when the subject of race comes up.  How can we hope for a “national conversation on race” if an imaginary hand constantly hovers over us, ready to press the buzzer with accusations of “racist” or “racial oversensitivity?” 

Ultimately, my experience gave me the chance to get my worst-case scenario out of the way.  (Although I think this mistake speaks more to my political ignorance; I couldn’t tell any of the white politicians at the party apart either.)  I decided that in my efforts to educate myself about the complex legacy of slavery and discrimination in America, to deprogram some of the racist attitudes that I’d formed during my childhood, to gain a new perspective from the privileged white one I’d been raised around, I was likely to make more mistakes.  But occasionally looking foolish seemed to me a better fate than a lifetime of remaining ignorant.    

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