There’s a rule everybody knows. Not the golden one. Since the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, when “one drop” of black ancestry determined the whole of who you were, black-by-default is a weakened but lingering cultural assumption and it shapes the way many mixed-race people navigate their lives. But a lot has changed, too. Particularly in the pre-civil rights era, passing as white -- if appearances made it plausible -- was a way to defy racist restrictions. Now, new research by University of Vermont sociologist Nikki Khanna shows that passing has a new face.

In a study published in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Khanna finds that not only do black-white biracial adults exercise considerable control over how they identify, there is “a striking reverse pattern of passing today,” with a majority of survey respondents reporting that they pass as black.

Passing, as currently defined, is about adopting an identity that contradicts your self-perception of race. Despite having a white mother and a black father, President Obama considers himself black. He is not passing -- his identity is solidly rooted within the black community. The people Khanna interviewed, however, view themselves as biracial or multiracial, but choose to pass as black in certain contexts.

“Most people in my sample talked about certain situations, with a group of friends, say, where they might downplay their white ancestry, which can carry its own negative biases,” Khanna says. Other reasons cited for passing as black included a desire to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities sometimes available to those who are black. That example created controversy in the media where it was suggested that biracial individuals are “gaming” a system designed to address past injustice and advance diversity.

It’s a charge Khanna finds offensive, noting ways, perhaps for better and worse, the one-drop rule still applies. She says checking both black and white on a college admissions form, for instance, will reclassify the applicant as black. And what, she asks, would make a biracial person less deserving? The idea that passing is unethical fails to account for its roots. As Khanna notes in her paper, gays may pass as straight, in Nazi Germany, Jews passed as Protestants. “In each case,” she writes, “the reason is traceable to some form of discrimination.” 

Label Laws

The phenomenon of passing as black, according to Khanna, suggests a changing culture around race relations and politics in the United States. Blackness is less stigmatized today, so biracial and multiracial individuals feel freer to experiment with their identity, expressing pride in that part of their heritage and taking steps to accent attributes that are considered black.

It makes sense, given fast-changing demographics. A recent story in the New York Times reported that just-released 2010 census data (based on analysis of the 42 states then available) show that the nation’s mixed-race population is growing far more quickly than experts had estimated, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest, with a national average growth rate since 2000 expected to be near fifty percent.

Of course those figures include all ethnicities. Khanna, who began her research with the intention of studying Asian-white individuals as well as black-white, found the differences between cultures to be too deep to compare. Much, she says, comes down to how you look.

“We’re such a multiracial population -- you can see that visually when you look at people who are identified or labeled black,” Khanna says. “I think that spills over to biracial people and they often talk about how others draw on this one-drop rule. They say, ‘Yeah, you might have blond hair but you’re really black.’”

That, she says, doesn’t happen to Asian-whites. “It’s not like if you have Japanese ancestry you’re Japanese,” says Khanna. “You might claim to have a biracial identity or say ‘I’m Japanese and white’ but that doesn’t mean people are always going to categorize you as Japanese.”

Among the participants in her study, Khanna found wide-ranging appearances, from people she would never have guessed were anything but black, to the reverse. While physical characteristics didn’t necessarily affect how people identified -- some people who look white had strong black identities -- how those connections are perceived by others reveals a lot. “Why would you identify as black, you look white, you have a choice,” is a frequent question from whites.

“The interesting thing about studying people’s individual identities,” says Khanna, “is that it says a lot about race relations more broadly.” It says, yes, America is a rapidly changing culture, but a country with roots in slavery has a lot to shed.

In Khanna’s case, with an Indian father and a white mother, she calls herself mixed or multiracial. Personally, she rejects the term biracial and its connotation of opposites, black or white.