(host) In 1882, the US passed which suspended Chinese immigration for ten years.

The law was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902.

It wasn't repealed until 1943 when China became an ally of the U.S. in World War II.

But in the intervening years, although the Chinese immigrant population in the U.S. sharply declined, it didn't stop altogether.

At the tail end of the 19th century and into the dawn of the 20th, Chinese immigrants looking to enter the U.S. found themselves barred from coastal cities and states like California and New York.

But the U.S. shared a then-more-lenient border with its southern neighbor, Mexico.

In order to enter the country, Chinese migrants disguised themselves as Mexican nationals and entered the U.S. with doctored documents.

Professor Allyson Hobbs of Stanford University details stories like this and other instances of racial passing in her book "A Chosen Exile."

While Hobbs notes that stories of African Americans who passed for white in the 20th century to avoid the terror of Jim Crow laws remain the more commonly known passing narratives in the US, people from a variety of backgrounds have chosen to pass in order to change their class, legal, and social standing in society.

[bright music] So, "passing" is when people decide to change their background and their social identifiers in order to gain certain benefits.

And in U.S. history, the most commonly discussed instances of passing are usually people pretending to be of European descent.

And that's because, at various points in time, whiteness, or being of Western European descent, particularly Anglo-Saxon, has carried with it certain legal protections and benefits.

As Professor Cheryl Harris notes in her article, "Whiteness as Property," those legal protections are directly linked to property.

This can include things like the ability to earn a living, travel freely between states, purchasing a home, or attending elite schools.

Harris details how cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education demonstrate a positive correlation between property, prosperity, and race in U.S. law.

In Plessy's 1896 case, Homer Plessy, a New Orleans man of European and African descent, boarded a whites-only railway car with the intention of being detained in order to fight the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act which dictated that citizens of different races must ride in designated cars.

Plessy's case was supported by a group of Louisiana citizens who argued that dividing the cars deprived Black riders of their legal rights.

The Supreme Court eventually declared that the state and the railroad company had the right to maintain segregated cars, ultimately leading to the "separate but equal" doctrine that became the backbone of Jim Crow and segregation laws in the U.S.

These laws ostensibly granted separate facilities for white and Black citizens, but they more effectively created generational systematic class divides in the U.S. that aligned with race.

It wasn't until the Supreme Court's decision in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine was struck down.

The plaintiff's attorneys argued effectively that segregated schools disadvantaged Black children who were being put into facilities that were understaffed, underfunded, and therefore guaranteed worse life outcomes for Black children than their white peers.

But the pivotal argument in the case came in the of the Clark doll experiment.

Doctors Mamie and Kenneth Clark, a husband and wife psychologist team, conducted experiments with Black children in order to determine the lasting psychological impacts of the racial bias created by legal segregation.

The Clarks showed groups of Black children two sets of dolls, ones that looked white and ones that looked brown.

The Clarks asked the children to identify the traits they associated with the dolls, including which one was white and which one was negro or colored.

They also asked the children to identify which dolls were good and which were bad, as well as which dolls looked more like them.

Overwhelmingly, the children identified the white dolls as good and the brown dolls as inferior, with some children becoming so overwhelmed and upset when asked to identify themselves with the brown dolls that they would cry or run from the room.

Future Supreme Court Justice and one of the attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall, persuaded other members of the NAACP legal defense team to use the Clark's findings in the court case.

The result was a persuasive demonstration of how awarding legal protections and privilege based on race had long-lasting effects on children who are marked outside of the privileged group.

Therefore, the arguments for desegregation centered on questions of legal access rather than the desire to subvert or hide Black identity.

So the legal undergirds of how we assign financial or other benefits based on race or gender or ethnic background or country of origin is often the true motivator for people to pass, more so than a desire to change their race or appearance.

But the question of passing and legality does not just extend to the benefits of property assigned on the basis of race.

It can also encompass related concepts like physical safety.

For example, during World War II, it was common for European Jews to either change their last names or hide their Jewish heritage in order to escape concentration camps and extermination at the hands of the Nazi Party.

And throughout history, passing for persecuted groups has extended to any place and time where those in the social minority were in physical or legal danger from the state because their group had been designated as undesirable.

So, passing in those cases was a matter of life and death.

And some of you may remember the story of Ellen Craft and her husband William, who in 1848 engineered their own escape from slavery in Georgia by passing.

Ellen, dressed as a white male planter, traveled north from Georgia, with William pretending to be her manservant.

They were able to check themselves into hotels and board railroads until they safely reached the North.

I mentioned the story of Ellen and William in our episode on cross-dressing, but the implications of passing here are also present because Ellen was able to gain access to these elite hotels and methods of transportation along with William because she was passing for a white man.

But the benefits of being within a legally protected group wasn't just known to those attempting to pass or cross over.

They were also acknowledged by members of the protected group.

In 1863, abolitionist propaganda, circulated in the U.S., displayed pictures of mixed-heritage children from New Orleans with very fair skin who were also born into slavery.

Because under U.S. law, slavery was a legal condition that was passed down from mother to child, these children, although they could pass for white or had what was considered very small percentages of Black heritage, were still considered legal slaves.

Northern abolitionists, fearing that support for the Civil War was waning as rich citizens were often exempted from service and poor white citizens were drafted in higher numbers, used the images of these children to elicit empathy and support for the abolition of legal slavery.

These images were printed in Harper's Weekly and on small souvenir photographs called carte de visite.

Abolitionists like Henry Ward Beecher stated that in addition to the great evils of slavery, situations like this, where white passing children could also be enslaved, should strike outrage and fear into conscientious white citizens.

Because if these children, who looked so close to the appearance of the children of the predominantly white and middle-class abolitionist readers of "Harper's Weekly" could be enslaved, then what was stopping free white children and their parents from being drawn into the treacherous clutches of slavery?

The appeal was incredibly effective on anxious readers who noted that race, which had long stood as the primary determinant of slavery in the U.S., was not a foregone and concrete conclusion.

If people who could pass as white were still enslaved, then the boundaries of legal protections based on race were fluid and fragile, making them more difficult to police.

And in the 20th century, this anxiety around the fragility of racial legal boundaries was discussed and immortalized in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, most famously in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel "Passing."

But to add one more confusing spoke to this already huge wheel, passing does not just occur when those in a illegally disadvantaged group claim membership in the dominant culture.

There are also cases where those from the dominant group have crossed into a minority group, often causing public shock and outcry when their deceptions are revealed.

I mean, who can forget the internet outrage caused by Rachel Dolezal?

But despite her notoriety, she was far from the first.

Hobbs notes the case of musician Mezz Mezzrow, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who chose to pass as Black at various points in his life to strengthen his jazz career and later wrote about it in his 1946 autobiography, "Really the Blues."

Mezzrow hoped to gain social capital and increased ability to book gigs as a jazz musician by passing.

And an actor who went by the stage name Iron Eyes Cody rose to fame in the latter half of the 20th century claiming membership in several Native American tribes.

At the height of his career, he was featured as an actor in Western films, starred in the famously publicized "Crying Indian" ad of 1971, authored a book on what he claimed were types of Native-American sign language, and even landed himself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

It wasn't until he died in 1999 that it was discovered that he was actually the son of two Sicilian immigrants who was born Espera Oscar de Corti in 1904 in Louisiana.

But despite evidence, including baptismal records and family accounts, De Corti still claimed to be the child of a Cherokee father and Cree mother until he died.

And there's also the story of Linda Taylor, a white woman who passed as a variety of races, including Black, throughout her life in order to engage in a myriad of illegal schemes such as changing wills, cashing fake checks, theft, and most famously, welfare fraud.

A report from Josh Levin at "Slate" notes how Taylor, passing as a Black woman, came to national attention in 1976 when then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan used her case as an example of reasons to restructure American welfare programs.

Taylor was rapidly becoming infamous as the "welfare queen" when Reagan found her story in an article in Chicago newspapers.

Later, it was revealed that she was born a white woman in Tennessee and raised in Arkansas as Martha Miller, and she later began passing for different races and ages in order to aid her in her crimes.

So, just like whiteness has a social capital that has material gains that aren't only related to improved finances, the kinds of capital that people hope to gain by passing isn't directly tied to the dominant social group but still bears the potential for legal gains, like subverting the law, and financial gains, like making a career in entertainment.

So, passing carries with it the potential to alter someone's legal or social status, pointing to the difficulty of pinning down social markers that are often subjective and fluid.

But the material results of passing usually benefit the person crossing the divide in tangible ways.