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.42 Kazan was worried because people might think we re saying Negroes andwhites shouldn t marry.We solve this story in personal terms.This particu-lar boy and girl shouldn t get married.we don t mean this story to betrue of all people with colored and white skins. At one point, the film intro-duces the character of a black doctor clearly imagined as a more suitablechoice for Pinky but it forecloses this possibility with the image of the doc-tor s wedding band.Such romantic coupling would have introduced its ownproblems in terms of the film s ability to elude censors (that is, it would haveintroduced an actual mixed couple on screen).See Ebony, September 1949,p.25.43 At the same time, in establishing a pleasurable, conspiratorial relation be-tween the two women, the scene paves the way for Pinky s ultimate acquies-cence to Miss Em s appeals to truth, not Dicey s more old-fashioned ap-peals to place. 44 Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, 213.45 Pinky s decision at the conclusion of the film to reject the rather stultify-ing option of becoming Mrs.Thomas Adams and of giving up her job as anurse represents a significant divergence from the tradition of woman s films,in which the heroine typically sacrifices not marriage for career, but careerfor marriage.It is significant, too, that Pinky decides to fight it out withinthe white justice system for the right to retain ownership of the very prop-erty that once symbolized her own exclusion from white society.Reclaimingthe house as her own becomes Pinky s way of revising the traumatic mem-ory of once being turned away from its front gate.Pinky not only gains titleto the estate, but she redecorates and repopulates it, transforming the space 214 Notes to Chapter 4from which she herself was once prohibited into one literally filled with blackchildren.Pinky s decision to turn the house into a hospital allows the filmto imagine a southern black solution to the problem of passing.As Crippsnotes, it was rare at any time in Hollywood history for a movie to end withthe celebration of autonomous black community, let alone a successful blackhospital (Making Movies Black, 237 38).46 In addition to depicting a white woman as the key to Pinky s self-discovery,Kazan s film uses Ethel Waters s character to pass on a conservative idea of Negro service that envisions work and struggle within financially depen-dent, segregated institutions as the natural and appropriate means of blacksurvival.47 In the final scene Reverend Robert Dunn, the rector of Portsmouth s St.John s Episcopal Church, plays himself.48 Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy beforeand after Marx, trans.James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 196 97.49 David Wilkins, Introduction: The Context of Race, in Color Conscious: ThePolitical Morality of Race, ed.K.Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 21.50 Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, 241.Balibar s specific example here is genderidentity.51 Quoted in August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and Francis L.Broderick, eds.,Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed.(New York: Macmillan,1971), 280.52 Jerome, The Negro in Hollywood Films, 24.CHAPTER 4 I M THROUGH WITH PASSING 1 Stuart Hall, What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture? in Stuart Hall:Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed.David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen(New York: Routledge, 1996), 474.2 Janice Kingslow, I Refuse to Pass, Negro Digest, May 1950, p.30.3 For a discussion of postwar abundance that pays attention to the materialconditions of African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s and that resists thetemptation to idealize, see Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (NewYork: Vintage, 1990).For contemporary accounts that indulge in national-ist narratives of progress, see How Negroes Are Gaining in the U.S., U.S.News and World Report, June 28, 1957, pp.105 6 and Negroes: Big Advancesin Jobs, Wealth, Status, U.S.News and World Report, November 28, 1958, pp.90 92.4 Why Passing Is Passing Out, Jet, July 17, 1952, pp.12 13.The acronymfepc usually refers to the Fair Employment Practices Committee, although itcan also refer to the Fair Employment Practices Code.The former were com- Notes toChapter 4 215mittees established by executive order beginning in 1941 and charged withprohibiting discrimination in the defense industries and in government.5 Hall, What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture? 472.Hall uses thisphrase when referring to contemporary struggles over naming black Britishidentities as both black and British.Hall is referring to a moment in contem-porary Britain when old essentializing strategies seem outdated or inade-quate as responses to new social and cultural struggles.I use the phrase toname an earlier moment in the history of African American cultural practice,when material conditions of racial segregation give rise to similar strategies.6 For this notion of resistance I am indebted to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan.Inher introduction to Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolo-nialism (New York: Routledge, 1993), Sunder Rajan writes, Resistance is notalways a positivity; it may be no more than a negative agency, an absence ofacquiescence in one s oppression (12).Later in the same paragraph she cau-tions against the romantic fiction of resistance however politically well-intentioned such a fiction may be, suggesting instead a redefinition of indi-vidual resistance in terms of its social function rather than its performativeintentionality (12).7 As I discuss in the next section, virtually all of the magazines that I considerhere were owned by John Johnson, a black entrepreneur; yet ownership inthis sense is not what I mean by the term black periodical
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