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62 Ohio St. L.J. 1145 (2001)
Racial Passing

handle is hein.journals/ohslj62 and id is 1161 raw text is: Racial Passing RANDALL KENNEDY* I. PASSING: A DEFINrIoN Passing is a deception that enables a person to adopt certain roles or identifies from which he would be barred by prevailing social standards in the absence of his misleading conduct. The classic racial passer in the United States has been the white Negro: the individual whose physical appearance allows him to present himself as white but whose black lineage (typically only a very partial black lineage) makes him a Negro according to dominant racial rules. A passer is distinguishable from the person who is merely mistaken-the person who, having been told that he is white, thinks of himself as white, and holds himself out to be white (though he and everyone else in the locale would deem him to be black were the facts of his ancestry known).' Gregory Howard Williams was, for a period, such a person.2 The child of a white mother and a light-skinned Negro man who pretended to be white, Williams assumed that he, too, was white.3 Not until he was ten years old, when his parents * B.A. Princeton University, J.D. Yale Law School. This essay was derived from the 1998-1999 Frank R. Strong Law Forum Lecture delivered at The Ohio State University College of Law. 1 Some blacks have unknowingly been perceived as white. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton relate the experiences of a fair-skinned Negro woman who was initially treated with respect by a storeowner. Unbeknownst to her, the white proprietor took her to be a white person. The woman only learned of the mistake weeks later when she returned with her darker-skinned daughter. Seeing the woman in a new light, the proprietor immediately declined any further contact ST. CLAmDRAKE & HORACER. CAYrON, BLACK METROPOUS: A STUDY OFNEGRO LIFE IN ANORTHERN CITY 160 (Harper & Row 1962) (1945). For similar but more recent episodes of racial mistake, see ToI DERRJcoTrE, THE BLACK NOTEBOOKS: AN INTERIOR JOURNEY (1997), and JUDYScAL s-TRENT, NomS OFA WHrmBACK WO.uAN: RACE, COLOR, COMMUNITy (1995). 2 GREGORY HOWARD WALwa, LEE ON THE COLORLINE (1995). Gregory Howard Williams became a distinguished legal academic, serving as the Dean of The Ohio State University College of Law and the President of the American Association of Law Schools. 3 What made Williams's father aNegro was simplythe ascendant convention that defined as a Negro anyone with a certain degree of Negro ancestry. Williams's father was the son of a Negro woman who served as a maid in the household of a rich white family in Bowling Green, Kentucky. His father was a young white man in that household. When his mother's pregnancy became evident her employer fired her. After the baby was born, whites and blacks none too gently suggested that Sallie Williams leave town with her white nigge& baby. She resisted those demands until her older brother was murdered by unknown assailants; his mutilated body was found lashed to a railroad track. Fearing for her son's safety, Sallie Williams fled to Muncie, Indiana, which became home to Gregory Williams's father. WHUAMS, supra note 2, at 62 (1995).

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