Martha J. Cutter

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. In a 1964 interview with Ebony magazine, white journalist John Howard Griffin said he was probably the cause of Mansfield, Texas, becoming the “effigy burning capital of the world.” Three years earlier, Griffin’s book, Black Like Me, had been published by Houghton Mifflin.

Racial passing is in the news with the case of Jessica Krug, a white academic who claimed several Black identities throughout her professional career. The phenomenon of white people putting on different backgrounds is widespread—for example, as shown in well-documented cases of white people claiming Native American ancestry. But passing for Black seems, well, different. One reason for that may be that the idea of passing has historically been linked to Black people passing for white.