Aural Passing in Sonic Digital Media: Post Modern Black Face

written by tomasia

May 2011

Aural Passing in Sonic Digital Media: Post Modern Black Face

Passing is the act of assuming a fraudulent identity in order to facilitate some type of advantage. Traditionally, this act has been associated with the specific racial transgression of light skinned African Americans passing for White. The phenomenon of passing exposes cracks within the racial identity structure created via historical/legislative apparatus, enforced by state and community sanctioned violence and perpetuated within American institutions today. Asymmetrical conditions within housing, education, medical care and criminal justice run along racial lines and subvert equality. In contemporary mainstream music, the disembodied voice inverts the traditional apparatus of passing and facilitates aural passing for Black in a process of simultaneous creation and cooptation of Blackness by White corporate media especially in the multimillion dollar urban music market. Sonic digital media, mechanically reproducing the disembodied voice, inverts and perpetuates racial passing. Since the voice is more mutable than physical features, aural passing is easier and more insidious. Simulated Blackness, minstrelsy, or Blackface, are all facilitated with greater ease today within digitized sonic corporate media. In the corporate music industry, Blackness as an aural identity is produced and sold on the urban music market. This is evident especially when appropriated by White artists in a performance of racial mimicry that is a form of passing for Black. While aural passing destabilizes the boarders of Black and White identity, the racist structures that gave birth to and perpetuate passing remain intact. As with passing for White during the Jim Crow era, the passing subject destabilizes but does not dismantle the boarders through which she passes because she does so invisibly. Therefore, passing does not radically alter hegemonic racism, it only perpetuates it.

An examination of aural passing can help raise awareness as to how Blackness is created, marketed, bought, sold, and profited from at the expense of those who wear its badge and are disproportionately affected by substandard housing, education, medical care and incarceration. With the ideology of “post race” clouding perception of the racialized inequalities that persist, a raised awareness of the production, proliferation and profit structure of Blackness is pertinent. This paper will examine passing historically via legislation, contemporarily via passing for Black and within aural digital for-profit media, inverting the concept, in an attempt to demonstrate that despite progress in the area of racial equality, race remains one of the most significant and divisive factors in the construction of asymmetrical, hierarchical power and social injustice. In this paper I will interrogate the stereotypical “Blackness” that is perpetuated by the mainstream corporate music industry as an identity that has been constructed by societal forces that gain from such racialized fantasies and fetishized Blackness. Through an examination of “passing” historically and legislatively, an expansion of it’s definition to include any fraudulent appropriation of identity for benefit, and a study of  how it occurs today in digital sonic media, I will attempt to locate why and how stereotyped Blackness is in fact simulated and replicated as a product. Through the exploration of how identity is mediated, I will expose the creation and subsequent recuperation of Blackness by the White dominated institution of the corporate music industry via the phenomenon of White artists passing for Black in digital sonic media.

Baudrillard builds on Plato’s theory of the simulacra as representation removed from it’s referent. Within the simulacra, this universe of visual and aural reproductions detached from their referents via media, identity is also a simulation. The problem of identity in the context of the subject removed from its referent via the disembodied voice relates to racial passing/racial impersonation. In aural digital media, a simulated identity can be assumed by anyone because the subject is not seen. In this sense Blackness is a simulation utilized in the corporate music market as a product. This is most evident when we study artists who “pass for Black” in the exclusively aural experience of music listening. In aural digital media, in which the visual is removed, the “aural passing” is complete in and of itself. So aural passing is the process by which the listening audience experiences mimetic Blackness whether or not they realize the artist is actually White. Here the crisis of representation is deepened in terms of racial identification. On passing, Amy Robinson states, “In contrast to a model of identity that grants specular identification the ontological authority of recognition (knowing) the in-groups version of recognition is subsidized by the logic of the simulacrum” (Robinson 728). Identity as a simulation is perpetuated in the act of passing.

Historically, passing was a product of legislated racial segregation, the “Racial Purity Act” of 1924 (overturned in 1967) and the state sanctioned policy of hypodescent in which children of a mixed union are assigned the identity of the group with the lower social status in this case, Black. In the 19th and 20th centuries, if not earlier, passing was a means for white skinned African Americans to escape racism (Golub 567). Because of it’s prevalence as a Black American experience, passing has come to be synonymous with African Americans passing for White. American jurisprudence functioned in both the construction and maintenance of what were thought to be discreet racial groups, via legalized segregation, anti miscegenation laws and hypodescent policies in which persons with a percentage of Black blood were legally forced to identify as Black. “Jim Crow segregation laws sought to create the very racial groups that they purported simply to keep apart” (Golub 569). This combination of legislated racial separatism backed up by state and community violence gave birth to the phenomena of passing. “…from the unruly complexity of human physical variation, legal discourse forges what purport to be clear and stable racial lines”(Golub 567). In the infamous case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, Homer Plessy, a White skinned Black man, was arrested for boarding a “White’s Only” train car in Louisiana, in violation of the “Separate Car Act”. The charges were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in an act that simultaneously extended constitutional sanction to the Jim Crow segregation laws and confirmed the right of each state to determine criteria for membership within a specific racial group. Plessy was by court records “one-eight black”, his Blackness indiscernible. Plessy’s racial ambiguity was central to the case and to the role of the courts in “structuring the politics of race in America”(Golub 564). Mark Golub states:

Reading ‘Plessy’ as a case fundamentally about racial passing reveals the courts deep anxiety regarding mixed race individuals and the specter of interracial sexuality that ambiguously raced bodies necessarily signify. Within the court’s racial narrative, passing simultaneously constitutes a violation of white supremacist norms of sexual behavior and a challenge to the assumption of natural racial differences upon which the institutions of segregation depended (Golub 564-565).

In short, the existence of the African/European racially mixed individual defied legally enforced segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, and state sanctioned hypodescent making Black/White biracial personhood illegal in the United States until as late as 1983 when Louisiana became the last state to abolish enforced Black racial categorization based on a percentage of Black blood (Ben-Michaels 765). “In administering segregation laws, courts were necessarily called upon to assign races to those individuals whose actual bodies confounded the logical clarity of legal definition”(Golub 583). Golub states “re-examining this landmark case (Plessy vs. Ferguson)  from the perspective of racial indeterminacy is warranted because it suggests new and valuable insights regarding the law’s constitutive powers of racialization and production of racial subjectivity”(Golub 566). Golub states, “…law helps create the racial subjects on which it acts”(Golub 567). Anti-Miscegenation laws, for example, have had an effect on the very physical appearance of Americans. In this sense, race was actually imposed on the population by the state via enforced racial categorization, anti miscegenation laws and hypodescent and on society by the court’s imposition of segregation and “symmetrical” equality.

Hypodescent was legally sanctioned beginning in the 1800’s when individual states began to define people with varying degrees of Black blood as quadroon, octoroon, mulatto, or colored with less civil rights than people categorized as White. At the national level, hypodescent was sanctioned via the “Racial Purity Act” of 1924, which categorized a person as Black who had any traceable amount of Black blood, eradicating the previous categorizations based on blood quantum (Golub 584-589). These legislative processes gave birth to the phenomenon historically known as “passing”. The Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling linked the preexisting power of the state to impose racial categorization on individuals and the constitutionality of segregation illustrating “…the power of the law to define, construct, regulate and maintain racial categories”(Golub 596). In fact, the last piece of racialized legislation was not wiped from the books of American jurisprudence until 1983 when Susie Phipps challenged her “Black” racial categorization. With this case, Louisiana became the last state to banish an official calculation of race based on a percentage of Black blood. (Benn-Michaels 765). In the Rheinlander case of 1925, Alice Beatrice Jones was sued by her husband Leonard Kip Rheinlander for annulment due to fraud  because he claimed to have married her under the assumption that she was White. The Biracial daughter of a Black cab driver, she was forced to disrobe in front of a judge and jury to prove that she hadn’t lied and that her “race” was visible. This case elucidates the inherent violence in the creation of symbolic difference, in this case “racial identity”, via the forced exposure of the nude black female body as empirical proof  (Thaggert 1-3). “In a strictly biological sense it may be true that ‘there are no races’. Yet we cannot ignore that race remains a central fact of American social, economic, and political organization” (Golub 566). The Plessy and Rheinlander cases pose a challenge to Blackness as decipherable. In fact, the visual decipherability of race is significantly challenged in the phenomenon of passing itself, exposing that the visual is not a guaranteed signifier of race. Racial (and sexual) identity are “binary opposites in a visual economy of readable identity” (Robinson 717) and the very problem of passing is due to the unreliability of optical decipherability in determining race. “Vision masquerades as the agent of unmediated facticity” but in fact, is not. (Robinson 721). Paradoxically, passing necessitates a verifiable “real identity” from which the passer is transgressing yet exposes the instability of this very identity in the first place (Robinson 721). In Nella Larson’s 1929 novel Passing, the performative aspects of race are revealed including “how to stage the body in order to convey or deny a particular reading” (Thaggert 5) and the importance of fashion in constructing identity, both of which are manipulated for social gain by the women in the book. According to Rottenberg, embodying norms associated with Whiteness is required to access privilege and avoid utter banishment to the barren wastelands which are the margins of White dominant society. White racist regimes thus create the Black subject and paradoxically coerce her to assimilate to Whiteness in order to survive. “…desiring to approximate blackness, as it comes to be defined in this regime, means disidentifying with the dominant norms, can be dangerous, and can sometimes even lead to death” (Rottenberg 446). Conversely, approximating Blackness today can provide significant advantages when practiced situationally from escaping the stigma associated with being Multiracial to selling records via aurally passing for Black as part of a corporate music product line.

With the laws against miscegenation and enforced hypodescent finally overturned in 1967, passing began to take on a new face. According to Michelle Elam, a reexamination of passing brings up theoretically sound debates about the decipherability or optical availability of race, destabilizing the very concept. She warns against social constructionist reasoning which erroneously claims the biological and therefore social irrelevance of race. The idea that American society is “post race” clouds the reality of persistent structural inequalities built on the faultlines of race. Elam discusses three passing novels of the new millennia which reintroduce the relevance of the discussion of passing. Caucasia, The Intuitionist, and The Human Stain. Defining race as performative, Elam explains race as a process which is constantly renewed and reconstructed through actions, gestures and language. Race is enacted and reenacted, a continuous process of self creation and recreation (Michele Elam 749-768). Yet the fact that race is performative does nothing to change the racialized structural inequalities that continue to this day. With the abolition of all racialized legislation (in some states, not until as late as 1983) passing is inverted and “passing for Black” emerges as a new phenomena. Khanna and Johnson conducted numerous interviews with Multiracial Americans and discovered this reversal. According to their study, passing for Black is more common than passing for White today. Their study also looks at methods by which Multiracials perform race by “highlighting” or “downplaying” different aspects of identity without necessarily “passing as monoracial”. Of the study 31% of the Multiracial respondents pass as Black while only 3% pass as White. The study finds that Biracial/Multiracial people exercise a great deal of agency in asserting their racial identity to others. Strategies include “verbal identification/disidentification, selective disclosure, manipulation of phenotype, use of cultural symbols, and selective association” (Khanna and Johnson 393). Passing for Black within our aural digital media universe, however, goes beyond passing as monoracial to avoid the stigma of being multiracial in a society that was built on the violent separation of humanity into hierarchical racial groups. Passing for Black in the realm of mainstream digitized sonic media is the result of the White dominated corporate creation and reproduction of an aural Black identity for profit.

The first recording of the human voice was achieved in writing in 1860 in Paris on a phonautograph created by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martintville (Leon Scott). “Sound waves captured by a horn attached to a diaphragm vibrated a stiff brush that inscribed the pattern of waves on blackened paper”(Caughie 91). This sonic inscription, this phonautograph, led to actual sonic reproduction through the additional contribution of Thomas Edison who placed the inscriptions on wax. Caughie writes, the term ”
” ‘phonautograph’ suggests that the sound is literally there, textually inscribed on the blackened paper, and thus, technically, not a reproduction”(Caughie 91). “Embedded in Scotts nomenclature”, Caughie continues, “is the germ of the debates that technology has aroused in the modernist era over the relative value of-and indeed the very distinction between-original and copy, live and recorded, authentic and mechanically reproduced, sincerity and fakery, reproduction and representation”(Caughie 91). According to Caughie, subjectivity and representation are pushed into crisis via the mechanized reproduction of visual and sonic cues and sound technology pushes this crisis further via the production of audible identities and the heightened possibility of transgression or passing. With the advent of audio tech, the boundaries of identity are profoundly threatened. The original sound recording creates the schism between the live and the recorded which is the key to modernist ideas of art as commodity as well as subjectivity . This recorded/live schism can also be viewed in terms of passing. In fact, to Caughie, passing names the very experience of subjectivity in late modernity as all boarders, from geographic to social, are transgressed via advancements in technology. This destabilizes the idea of rigid identity, “the imperative that a person be self identical across time” (Caughie 93). The voice is disembodied via sound tech including the telephone, phonograph and radio in which the voice literally transcends the body. Caughie speaks of identity being “envoiced” through aural technologies like broadcasting and explains that the phenomenon of the disembodied voice opens up new possibilities for passing.
Caughie writes, “Once identity is detached from visual clues, passing across identity boundaries becomes all the more likely (Caughie 104). According to Caughie, “…the formation of the listener and listening communities crossed social and national boundaries” (Caughie 104). Caughie mentions Jeanne Scheper, who writes that Libby Holman, torch singer of the 1920’s who created blues that was associated with African Americans, performed early aural passing for Black which destabilized Black and White cultural identities. Caughie states, “I am concerned with the subversion of racial authenticity and the permeability of  boarders that ensue when voice is divorced from sight in the sensory experience of identity” and continues, “the slippage between authentic and counterfeit is…the special  provenance of sound technology”(Caughie 106). Caughie goes on “…verbal minstrelsy, or racial passing, becomes the paradigm for a reconfiguration of notions of identity, representation, authenticity and realness-hence, subjectivity-in sound technologies”(Caughie 106). Caughie analyses Julie Dash’s 1983 film, Illusions, in which a Black singer is used to overdub the vocals of a White singer (which was a common practice in Hollywood in the 40’s) exposing the exploitation of Black women by Hollywood producers as well as exposing “…the possibility of dissociating racial identity from the visual markers that have long defined passing in its first cultural sense” (Caughie 98) This Hollywood practice of using Black voices for White actors is a precursor to Whites’ aural passing for Black.

With the advent of sound recording, the formulation of disassociated aural identities began. Within the context of the commodification of Blackness, a staple of Capitalism since the commodification of Black bodies via the trans Atlantic slave trade (Tate 4), this meant the creation of an aural Black identity. The direct ancestor of contemporary aural Black identity produced and proliferated by corporate media is the minstrel show. Richard Martin and David Wondrich claim that Coon songs and minstrelsy are at the root of all American musical forms (Schroeder 139). The minstrel show paved the way for African American performers but only with the stereotyped Blackness that these performers would have to mimic, only with Blackface. African American “toasts” or rhyming narratives of folk heroes featured characters like “traveling coon” who had superhuman abilities to escape trouble (Schroeder 150). The Coon songs of the minstrel show born from these toasts were mostly performed on urban stages from the 1890s -1920s but were sometimes part of traveling medicine shows in which mixed race performance troupes played to mixed race audiences. These Coon songs persisted until the 30s and formed the earliest African American recordings. Ernest Hogan’s 1896 song “All Coons Look Alike to Me”, Luke Jordan’s “Traveling Coon” (1927), and Alec Johnson’s “Mysterious Coon” (1928) are all well known examples. Over 600 Coon songs were published in the 1890s via sheet music and were written mostly by African American songwriters (Schroeder 141). The Coon song was the portal by which African American songwriters accessed opportunity. The growth of the recording industry in the 1920s put these coon songs on wax and gave birth to “Race records” produced by exclusively White owned and operated major labels like Okeh, Paramount, Columbian and Victor who led the way for the corporate construction of aural Blackness. Alec Johnson’s Coon Songs were performed for Columbia records 1400 “Race Records” series in the late 20s. “African American audiences were expected to enjoy the song, despite the derogatory language” (Schroeder 149). Schroeder defines African Americans in Blackface, performing the White simulacra of Blackness as “passing for black” (Schroeder 152). In the decade between 1920 and 1930 race records sold millions of copies. During this period White owned record companies sent talent scouts to the South to find musicians to record. The White executives chose what to record, with marketing to Black audiences informing these decisions.

In the 19th century, unlike today, performers would use the minstrel show to subvert the racist regime like Bob Cole who co-wrote and performed in Whiteface for “A Trip to Coontown” in 1898 (the first Black Musical Comedy with an all Black cast). Davis states “19th century minstrelsy can be seen as both a perpetuation of a cruel status quo and the first sign of change, a form of theatre and a form of drag, an entry into a world in which black could be white, white could be black, anything could be itself and simultaneously its opposite”(Schroeder 144). But within the rigid structures of White corporate control, this subversion would not go far and in the contemporary digital mainstream sonic media market, is virtually nonexistent. Minstrel shows depicted Blacks as “fools designed to help White audiences maintain their sense of superiority” (Schroeder 147) and the same phenomenon is perpetuated today in the mainstream, multimillion dollar urban music market.

It is my belief that capitalism’s original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time. It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased-an operation that explains not only the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proferred and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes and bucks, in Donald Bogles coinage), but the American music industry’s never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, ‘N Sync, Pink, Eminem-all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure (Tate 4).

Thus, Black as an aural identity is created by corporate American media, evidenced most clearly by the aural “passing for Black” that goes on from Amy Winehouse to Justin Beiber, clear examples of how Black identity, and in this case Black aural identity, is created by Blacks along with the White spectator/listener controlled by the White overseer/executive. “there is no question that the White commodification of Black bodies structured all of this activity. (In this complex process) partly shared, partly Black cultural practices were circulated as authentically Black with Whites profiting…while obstructing the visibility of Black performers” (Schroeder 142).

Radio is another example of how the disembodied voice destabilizes identity facilitating the construction of aural identities. Caughie explains that since the inception of Radio broadcasting in the 30’s, writers have been commenting on the crisis of representation inherent within the disembodied voice. A 1931 BBC Broadcast by Harold Nicholson entitled “Myself and the Microphone” speaks on this crisis and warranted an overwhelming response of letters from listeners who shared the same anxiety about the insincerity of the “microphone personality”. Caughie states, “Insofar as gramophone and radio began to breakdown the distinction between the aural identity and the actual person, the broadcasting voice became literally…an imitation without an original” (Caughie 96). She goes on “Voice is not so much reproduced (captured) as produced (created)  on radio” (Caughie 97) like BBC’s creation of a “classless voice”. Aural digital technologies facilitate identity production and passing for Black, illuminating the construction of racial identities.

Carl Hancock Rux speaks on Franz Fanon’s concept of the identity dream.

“For now the oppressed continue to live in the dream of identity, the dream that (in reality) the oppressed are, in fact, Negro, Colored, Black, Minority, Afro or African American, Hispanic, Oriental, Dykes, Queers, Bitches, Hos, Niggaz. All accepted as real identities. The acceptance of these identities further compels the performance of these identities, whether compliant or rebellious.” (Tate 19).

Illustrating the fraudulent creation and proliferation of Black aural identity, Rux reveals that Eminem trained himself by mimicking rapper Ice Cube and rapper/producer Dr. Dre though “lip-syncing to their records in the mirror” (Tate 21) Says Rux,

“The badass thug and gangsta bitch are not purely the inventions of inner city urban imagination. They are also products of Hollywood’s imaginary American heroes: second generation immigrants turned Depression-era gangster moguls, as portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart; John Wayne’s cocky cowboy, Sean Connery’s hyper hetero sexual sci-fi upper class guy, James Bond” (Tate 23).

Rux states, “The Black male outlaw identity is a commodifiable character open to all who would like to perform it” (Tate 23). The institution of stardom (from Jesus to Gatsby to Vanilla Ice) provides icons that people can believe in to teach them lessons about themselves. Whether the icon is real or illusory is irrelevant. Rux states, “Identity is an invented thing. Race is an invented thing. They are not real, but they are actual.”(Tate 36). Race is an identity construction that is reified for profit in corporate digital media. So while geographic and social boarders become more permeable in late modernity they remain intact. The disembodied voice can pass through boundaries that remain. Within racist hierarchical structures, passing benefits the subject and within corporate aural digital media, the executive, yet fails to dismantle the boundaries. Robinson states “the limited subversion of the pass always requires that the terms of the system be intact…It is precisely the presence of rigid and artificial institutional binaries that not only produces the pass but also solicits the social practice of passing” (Robinson 735).

Aural passing for Black is a modern racial impersonation in the tradition of minstrelsy. The crisis of representation via the proliferation of the simulacra perpetuates the cultural colonization of Black forms by White institutions.  The minstrel show is the origin of the simulation of Blackness. Black men performing in Blackface are a testament to the fact that this Blackness is but a simulation. As White racial mimicry creating a simulacra of Blackness, this minstrelsy persists when Whites perform aural passing leaving the “minstrel mask” intact for the benefit of the White dominated corporate music industry. The minstrel show was a way for White America to convince itself of it’s superiority. Today minstrel Blackness remains a mask easily applied by White artists promoted by the music industry to sell the snake oil remedies du jour via aural passing for Black. The disembodied voice complicates the already shaky concept of identity which is destabilized in aural passing via sonic digital media but the hierarchical, asymmetrical and racialized power structure persists, as Whites pass for Black in mechanical/digital reproduction of audible “Black” identity via urban music proliferated by the corporate music industry. Just as Jim Crow passing did nothing to change the racist structures through which white skinned African Americans “passed”, aural passing for Black in digital music destabilizes identity yet does nothing to subvert institutionalized racism. White artists aurally passing for Black slip into Black audible caricature and create a marketable product via the music industry which actively promotes and benefits from this activity. The whole mechanism is inherently parasitic and the communities from which Blackness originated remain disproportionately affected by substandard conditions within institutions of housing, education  and medical care as well as incarceration. The White artists who perform aural passing may or may not be “authentic” in their appropriation of Blackness. There are various legends around how they “picked up” Black culture, but ultimately this identity performance is achieved through significant mimicry work, as is identity development in general. The disembodied voice creates audible identity machines that can be operated by anyone. When the presence of the original is no longer required, “authentic” identity, if there is such a thing, is problematized. If the study of racial passing is continued, it can shed new light on the construction of human difference, and help dismantle the hierarchical power structures on which these notions of identity are based.

Works Cited

1) Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Media and Cultural Studies : Keyworks, Durham & Kellner, eds.

2) Benn-Michaels, Walter. “The No-Drop Rule” in Vol. 20, No. 4 of Critical Inquiry
Symposium on “God” (Summer, 1994), pp. 758-769. Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343858

3) Caughie, Pamela L, “Audible Identities: Passing and Sound Technologies.” in Vol. 16,  Iss. 1 of  Humanities Research, Canberra: 2010.

4) Elam, Michele.  “Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead.” in Vol. 41,  Iss. 4 of African American Review, Saint Louis: Winter 2007.

5) Golub, Mark. “Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson.” in Vol. 39, No. 3  of Law & Society Review, pp. 563-600. Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Law and Society Association
Stable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557606

6) Johnson , Cathryn and Khanna, Nikki Khanna. “Passing as Black: Racial Identity Work among Biracial Americans.” in vol. 73 of Social Psychology Quarterly,  p 380-397.  December 2010.

7) Robinson , Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.” in Vol. 20, No. 4,  of Critical Inquiry Symposium on “God” (Summer, 1994), pp. 715-736. Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343856

8) Rottenberg Catherine. “Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire.” in Vol. 45,  Iss. 4 of Criticism, p. 435-452. Detroit: Fall 2003.

9) Rux, Carl Hancock, “Eminem: the New White Negro.” in Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate, 15-38. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003.

10) Schroeder, Patricia R. “Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race.”
in Vol. 33,  Iss. 2 of The Journal of American Culture, p. 139-153. Malden: Jun 2010.
Thaggert, Miriam. “Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case.”
in Vol. 5,  Iss. 2 of Meridians, p. 1-29. Middletown: 2005.

11) Tate, Greg, “Nigs R Us or How Blackfolk became Fetish Objects.” in Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Greg Tate, 15-38. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003.

12) Thaggert, Miriam. “Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case.”
in Vol. 5,  Iss. 2 of Meridians, p. 1-29. Middletown: 2005.