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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12450 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.

There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.

Yes, I'm familiar with the phenomenon you're describing, and the fact that at least some white people in certain industries think their careers would stand to benefit by attempting to pass themselves off as non-white people shows how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. More recently, Philip Roth wrote a novel about a black man whose career in academia can be at least partly attributed to successfully passing himself off as Jewish, which was widely (and apparently erroneously) believed to have been inspired by Anatole Broyard, a mixed-race writer and critic who died in 1990 and who passed himself off as white.

I'm curious if the phenomenon still exists in the "non-white -> white" direction, as opposed to its modern incarnation of "white -> non-white". Given the online circles in which I move, I hear about just about every example of a white academic or activist who gets exposed for pretending to be non-white, or a white teenager who "identifies as" trans-Korean or similar. It's possible that the reverse case may be equally common, but I just haven't heard of it because I'm in an echo chamber.

Skin-lightening products are a gigantic industry. Just who do you think is buying them(well, yes, women, but what kind of woman)?

The politician Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is actually 1/4-Indonesian but dyes his hair blonde and wears blue contacts in order to be a credible anti-immigration candidate. (I don't really think rounding up 75% to 100% is that big a deal but the aesthetics of looking dutch are probably pretty important to him.)

Fascinating, I always thought his skin tone was noticeably darker than the typical Dutchman.

"Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" by James Weldon Johnson is a great book-length example of that.

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