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.30 On this point see Amy Robinson, It Takes One to Know One: Passing andCommunities of Common Interest, Critical Inquiry 20 (summer 1994): 71536.31 There are other instances of such photographic quizzes of racial identity thatappear in various magazines throughout the decade.See, for example, WhatColor Will Your Baby Be? Ebony, May 1951, pp.54 57, as well as the illus-trations to Masco L.Young, Is Passing for White a Dying Fad? Color, April1957, pp.46 49.32 Hortense Spillers, Notes on an Alternative Model: Neither/Nor, in TheDifference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,1989), 165.33 I Passed for Love, Tan, March 1953, pp.33 34, 61 68.The contrivances of 218 Notes to Chapter 5the narrative of I Passed for Love suggest that it is a fictionalized true confession.In any case, it is the article s conveyance of a certain impressionof verisimilitude that is crucial to the reader s ability to derive pleasure andmeaning from it.For more detailed analyses of methodologies for interpret-ing formulaic popular texts, particularly those that construct women readersas ideal audiences, see Radway, Reading the Romance, and Modeleski, Lovingwith a Vengeance.34 A daughter s self-sacrifice for her mother is a conventional premise ofwomen s confessional stories and usually serves as a means by which maternaldesire is elicited in the daughter.35 Langston Hughes, Fooling Our White Folks, Negro Digest, April 1950, pp.38 41.36 Why I Never Want to Pass, Ebony, June 1959, pp.49 52, 54.37 Richard Dyer discusses whiteness as a terrorizing imposition, a power thatwounds, hurts, tortures in his essay White. See Dyer, White, Screen29, no.4 (autumn 1998): 44 64.See also bell hooks s discussion of Dyer sessay in her essay Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 169.38 This point is similar to one that hooks makes in Representations of White-ness, 168.39 Have Negroes Stopped Passing? Jet, September 13, 1956, pp.10 12, andMasco L.Young, Is Passing for White a Dying Fad? Color, April 1957, pp.46 49.The Jet article contains no byline.The Color article is essentially arevision and expansion of the earlier piece.40 The Jet article doesn t specify whether Saunders asked her new employer thesame rhetorical question, although it implies that she was not passing orbeing passed when she found the new job.CHAPTER 5 A MOST DISAGREEABLE MIRROR 1 On looking relations and race, see Jane Gaines, White Privilege andLooking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory, Screen 29,no.4 (autumn 1988): 12 27; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation(Boston: South End Press, 1992); and Deborah McDowell, Pecs and Reps:Muscling in on Race and the Subject of Masculinities, in Race and the Subjectof Masculinities, ed.Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham, N.C.:Duke University Press, 1997), esp.365 66.2 W.E.B.Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Penguin,1989), 5.3 The journal entries of which Black Like Me is composed originally appearedas the series Journey into Shame in Sepia, a now defunct black monthly Notes toChapter 5 219whose white publisher funded Griffin s experiment, in monthly installmentsbetween April and October 1960.Modeled after Look and Ebony, the latterits closest competitor, Sepia probably never attained circulation over seventy-five thousand.4 For a trenchant discussion of this failure, as well as the visibility politics ofpassing more generally speaking, see Peggy Phelan s discussion of AdrianPiper s calling card performances and Jennie Livingston s 1991 film ParisIs Burning in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge,1993), 93 111.Phelan s discussion on pp.96 99 is particularly relevant to myargument about Griffin s narrative.5 Foucault s arguments about the agency of panoptics in the subjectification ofthemodern self are well-known.I refer thereader tohis Discipline and Pun-ish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).For a critique of Fou-cault s work in the context of a larger discussion of race, gender, and moder-nity, see Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 36 42.6 Wiegman, American Anatomies, 40.7 I insert the term cross-racial in scare quotes here to draw attention to thecomplicity of language in the enforcement of the racial binary.To the degreethat cross-racial refers to opposing spheres of racial being, the phrasehas much the same inadequacy as the term biracial, which is typically usedonly to refer to subjects who are already ethnoracially marked.David TheoGoldberg makes a related point in a discussion of the notion of hyphen-ated Americans in his essay Multicultural Conditions, in Multiculturalism:A Critical Reader, ed.David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994),37 n.20.8 Julie Ellison, A Short History of Liberal Guilt, Critical Inquiry 22 (winter1996): 352.9 Ibid., 348.10 I analyze this irony in greater detail later in this chapter in my discussion ofpassing s mirroring effect in Griffin s narrative.11 Since its publication in book form in 1961, Black Like Me has sold more thantwelve million copies, been translated into fourteen languages, and appearedin numerous English-language editions, including one in South Africa.By1971, it had become enough of a staple in junior high and high school class-rooms to merit its own Cliffs Notes, which are still in print
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