In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal came to media attention and resigned her post as president of the Spokane, Washington, NACCP, due to the allegation that she is white but has been passing for black. The Dolezal scandal puzzled the public because it invert ...
In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal came to media attention and resigned her post as president of the Spokane, Washington, NACCP, due to the allegation that she is white but has been passing for black. The Dolezal scandal puzzled the public because it inverted the classic narrative of racial passing. This event inspired me to investigate Faulkner’s enigmatic character Joe Christmas in the light of “reverse racial passing.” In Faulkner’s novel, Joe Christmas is not black in color and there is no clear evidence that he has black blood. Nevertheless, few critics have discussed Joe Christmas as a white man passing for black, perhaps, because it was incredibly unusual for a white man to pass for black especially in the South during the era of Jim Crow, or, borrowing Desmond-Harris’ words, because the idea that a white man would present himself as black had “scarcely any cultural, historical, or psychological framework” that they could understand. This essay attempts to read Christmas as a Southern racist white man passing for black. When Christmas presents himself as black in front of white women, it is not a sign of his identifying with blackness or confiding in his blackness per se; rather, he is intentionally performing the opposite race or passing for black. In the novel, not only does Christmas present himself as black but also he is not tolerant of white women who accept his black persona and have sex with him, which apparently renders Christmas misogynistic. I would argue that this has more to do with race rather than gender. In other words, Christmas acts out a black man particularly in the relations with white women in order to test their racial royalty. In the post-Emancipation South where “the fact of miscegenation . . . could evade or straddle the color line” (Adbur-Rahman, 176), Christmas is playing as a self-anointed guard who polices the racial boundaries. Just like his grandfather, Dr. Heins, who had let his own daughter die as a punishment for having a sexual relationship with a man who is suspected to be black, Christmas is anxious and determined to preserve the racial purity of white people. Thus, Christmas punishes white women who cross the color line and accept his black persona. This essay discusses Christmas as a character who is passing as black in order to police racial boundaries in the 1930s American South and investigate the “cultural, historical, or psychological framework” of Christmas’ reverse racial passing that not only the Jefferson people but also critics have struggled in vain to understand.