Racial Passing from the twentieth century is still relevant in today’s America. People of black ancestry racially passing as white still do it because they still reap from the benefits of doing so. A common phrase in the Caribbean about racial passing is, ‘it is a mixture of what you gain by being white and what you lose from being a colored person’. Due to the racism that was alive during the twentieth century and today, being black was a burden and those who could pass as white did. Being black had huge disadvantages for people that identify as such, both had to deal with psychological discrimination built on centuries of oppression and the consequences of the oppression that they life with today. In addition, the opposite was also true for colored people trying to pass. Being white came with huge benefits, by being white colored people could immediately run away from the burdens that came with being black and you got the advantages of a white person like education and overall just more opportunities. However, depending on what they identified with came two completely different worlds. If they choose to identify with white people, they get the American dream, with all the necessaries to be happy. While if they had dared to stay black even though it came with an amazing culture it also came with years of deterioration in the entire community.
America has not been very kind to black people, they have been brutal to them in fact. The Reconstruction era during America did not put any effort into helping the black community (proof) and ended it early since it was not of much of significance to the elites in America. After the Civil War the damage of slavery had taken a significant toll on black people.
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America “freed” black people that spent their whole lives as slaves and built the black community as people on that shaky foundation. White people at the time barely followed the new amendments and this one was no different. White people used this as an advantage for them, since black people did not know any better, they continued to treat them as slaves with, “mild” changes. This system was also known as the Black codes to keep black people under slavery of a different name. As said by Fredrick Douglass, “{The Black man} is free from the individual master but a slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter. He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky” . Racism was still at an all-time high after the civil wall with the creation or many anti-Black groups, violence and the refusal of many white people to give black people land.
Being Black in America means being a second-class citizen, which is why most people that could pass as white did and still do. However, the colored persons that could pass but decided to stay black faced many prejudices. Being Black was the worst thing you could because of everything you lost by being Black, even your humanity, “And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each colored man…He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, nor even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man ” . In addition, black people have missed out on job opportunities, education and so much more. White Passing black people lived in the fear of their past coming back to the surface because of what they could lose. For example, Alexander Manly a white passing black person trying to find a job, “he struggled to find work at first; when employers found out that he was black, they insisted that they could not hire him because of union restrictions.” Many people that passed as white lived in fear of getting exposed of “coming out” as black and getting there whole new life destroyed and being judged and not accepted by the white or black people in America .
Being White in America is the definition of having the odds stacked in your favor. Many people who passed as white gained many advantages like education, more job opportunity and housing and over all a new start at life. An example of people that just moved and left their old life behind was Lukasik’s mother who “left New Orleans and went on the other side” . People who passed as white go on to life a totally different lifestyle if they reap the benefits of being white, for example “My boy, you are by blood, by appearing, by education and by tastes, a white man. Now why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle of the black people of the United States?”. Family offend encouraged the white passing by when having white passing children they would separate themselves from the child so the child could reap from white privilege, this is evident in Carol’s memoir, when her father’s black mother separates herself from her son when he’s in school in a white neighborhood so the people in the neighborhood do not get think of the child as suspect .
Racial passing that was used in the twentieth century is still very relevant in today’s America. The reason for racial passing is still due to the superiority white people have had in America and the inferiority that was been pivalate within the black community from the past and to this day. Even during the start of Black people’s freedom white people were still in control of what black people got to have, especially property . Racial Passing is still prevalent in the twenty first century because of the years of damage on the black community is still there and the people that pass as white do not want to be associated with the damage. However racial passing in the during the twenty first century is less of a justification recently since a lot has changed since the twentieth century in ways of thinking, and socially in America. Since the end of slavery and segregation and the laws preluding them the need of. As laws changed ideology of less racist thoughts followed. In addition, many programs have been made to help out the black communities and have successes in their goal.
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