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Nov 19, 2021 · Kelly McWilliams writes about being a light-skinned Black woman, the one time she intentionally passed for white and the grief she felt about that decision.
- Kelly Mcwilliams
Bernice Lee (Sonya Wilde) is a young woman of mixed African and European ancestry, living in Chicago with her family, and she is mistaken for a fully white woman by a white man, who tries to hit on her repeatedly. Her brother, more obviously of mixed heritage, fights off the man.
A young, light-skinned African-American woman, tired of discrimination, decides to move away from home and pass for white, as the title says. With lightning speed she gets married to a wealthy white man, but, predictably, gets tied up in knots trying to hide her past.
A young, light-skinned African-American woman, tired of discrimination, decides to move away from home and pass for white, as the title says. With lightning speed she gets married to a wealthy white man, but, predictably, gets tied up in knots trying to hide her past.
- (332)
- Drama
- Fred M. Wilcox
- 1960-03-18
- What to Know About Passing, The Book
- What to Know About The Netflix Adaptation—And How It Differs from The Book
- What to Know About Nella Larsen, The Author of Passing
The novel begins when Irene Redfield receives a letter from her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who wants to reconnect and reminisces on their chance meeting two years earlier at a hotel in Chicago, their shared hometown. In this recollection, Irene, who now lives in Harlem, is home visiting her father, but stops during a shopping trip for a break o...
Hall, who directed and wrote the screenplay, was inspired to adapt Passing into a film in an effort to better understand her own mixed-race heritage. According to an interview with WBUR, Hall read the book 13 years ago, during a time when she was delving into her own family’s ambiguous racial history. In the time following, she learned that her mot...
When it comes to passing narratives, Nella Larsen is largely regarded as the preeminent author, despite having only published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing(1929) and a number of short stories. Born in 1891 in Chicago to a white Danish mother and a Black father from the Danish West Indies, Larsen was raised in a white household after her ...
- Cady Lang
At a fast-moving 93 minutes, it's a cautionary tale about the road to unhappiness experienced by a fair-skinned “black” woman who chooses to “pass” (let stand assumptions that she is not black) for white. The film's title, alone, got it noticed.
Although she embraces her heritage, Bernice, against her black grandmother's advice to live life truthfully, heads to New York to start life anew as white under the assumed name Lila Brownell. She is quickly courted by Rick Leyton of a prominent white New England family.
