This article explores the cultural, social, and communicative challenges inherent in the phenomenon of black-to-white racial passing in the United States among upwardly mobile, heterosexual, bi-racial men in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it applies Giddens’s Theory of Structuration to legal precedent and literature in order to describe why and explain how passers severed social relations with black American communities in general and, in many instances, with their black families in particular. This analysis of passing on macro, meso, and micro levels ultimately calls the ideological and epistemological foundations of race itself into question.
“In Search of a ‘Singular I:’A Structurational Analysis of Passing,” Ethnic Studies Review 28.2 (2005): 1-16.