The Dialects of Passing

Though in its most literal definition, racial passing requires convincingly pale skin, this is not the only trait that leads to “successful” passing. Instead, as Tomeiko Ashford explores, racial passing requires a much more extensive appeal to white-coded traits and a rejection of perceived Black traits and Black culture. Ashford explores both “traditional” passing narratives, where a character fully passes as white, and non-traditional passing narratives. These include stories where a character gains proximity to whiteness as well as stories where they separate themselves from definitions of Blackness (or any other racial distinctions) enough to gain social capital and critique structures of oppression and implicit biases (Ashford 89, 93). She suggests that authors can do this by modifying the structure of the narrative and dialogue “to remove or mutate ‘identifiable markers,’ particularly those deriving from [B]lack communal imperatives” (Ashford 91). This argument proposes that passing narratives, even when the passing character does not literally pass as white, require the character to remove racial identifiers from their fashion, speech, or other forms of presentation to the world.

However, what we might perceive as “removing” racial identifiers almost always means conforming to white racial identifiers, as whiteness is almost always seen as a default instead of another racialized way of acting. The Fields sisters propose that the belief “accepted implicitly by most Americans, is that there is only one race,” stating that Americans accept “Black” as an explicit race, while not extending that same understanding to whiteness (Fields 115). From here, we can assume that Ashford might propose that these abstracted passing narratives include characters who either switch from speaking in dialects racialized as Black, or, depending on the writers or directors, poor stereotypes attempting to replicate these dialects, to “proper” white dialects, or they speak in white dialects from the beginning.

In Passing, some critics have recognized how Irene and Clare’s speech patterns seem to exist outside of racialized dialects, as they instead tend to use language just commonly associate with womanhood in the 1920’s. One such critic proposes that as “small talk [between Irene and Clare] presents Larsen with a style of social critique that neutralizes the class distinctions and racial hierarchies that its proper practice is putatively meant to maintain” (Krumholtz 2). Krumholtz proposes here that the polite, formalized medium of small talk allowed the passing women in the novel to avoid racialization. Through using a method of speaking intended for (primarily white) women to seem socially acceptable, Clare and Irene’s language both grant them some degree of racial ambiguity, whether just to the reader or within the narrative.

Barbara Chin further contextualizes Clare and Irene’s use of language within the Harlem Renaissance, especially given the context of the New N***o Movement. Proposing that Irene wishes to highlight and celebrate her Black identity, Chin suggests that Clare’s distance from Harlem and her act of not just passing, but marrying a deeply racist man, leads Irene to view Clare as an outsider of sorts. This bleeds into the language Irene and Clare both use, not only in conversation but also in attempts at definition. Chin writes:

"Even as she continues to spend time in Harlem later in the novel, physically crossing cultural boundaries, she maintains her passing identity. Yet, Clare presents a complicated form of language crossing in that even as Irene attempts to define Clare as outside the race with no access or right to the language of that culture, her continued relationship with Clare, like her continued participation in the conversation, recognizes Clare as a black woman who does belong. (Chin)"

Here, Chin proposes that as long as Clare maintains her passing identity, at the very least in Irene’s eyes, she shouldn’t be allowed to use the language of the culture of Harlem. She inserts this belief about how dialects and cultural language are an inherent element of passing into the novel of Passing itself, no longer a bias the reader might bring but a belief of the novel’s characters. She suggests that Clare’s passing puts a barrier between her and Black coded language, not because it would expose her as passing, but because, to Irene, her commitment to passing, even in Black spaces, removes her from a Black identity.

Meanwhile, in The Human Stain, Silk’s identity as a traditional academic almost forces him into white dialects. As the academy itself was founded as an exclusively white space, the dialects of academia hold the same proximity to whiteness that Ashford referenced in analyzing “non-traditional” passing narratives. As recently as 2018, sociologists investigating race and gender stratifications in advancements in the academy have admitted their “findings are probably biased in favor of those who have experienced upward mobility and may have followed the [w]hite normative logics of academia” (Moore et al. 236). Therefore, I wouldn’t find it outrageous to assume that the dialects and language that Silk adopted during his tenure at Athena College were commonly associated with whiteness. Again, while Coleman is not explicitly portrayed as codeswitching, this argument is based as much on Coleman’s reputation as his use of language. While Zuckerman writes that he was “hardly the prototypical pedantic professor of Latin and Greek,” he is still an “outgoing, sharp-witted, forcefully smooth big-city charmer” within his role at Athena College (Roth 4). Even as he escapes certain stereotypes of academia, his wit, charm, and outgoing persona still require an appeal to the existing structures of the academy.

From here, the dialects culturally perceived as white which passing characters use are obviously at risk of slipping into their written word too. While, once again, these characters are not explicitly shown code-switching within the novel, Irene’s reactions to Clare and Silk’s success and repute within the academy--a field almost exclusively built on writing and networking--both imply their dialect has a bearing on their passing and how it influences their success. As we approach how these dialects affect letter writing, we have to begin to analyze how cultural expectations and classifications are defined within the medium of letters.