The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by John Sheehy

Consciousness Doubled: Passing and Double-Consciousness

When he faces the mirror, the ex-colored man confronts precisely this fundamental ambiguity in American racial identity, an ambiguity that proceeds from what seems a fairly simple dualism ("blackness" vs. "whiteness") but which always eventually "doubles and (re)doubles." This ambiguity is an explicit problem for the "passing" Negro, but the same ambiguity is implicit in the "double-consciousness" W. E. B. Du Bois asserts as the sine qua non of all African American experience. Du Bois's discussion of Negro consciousness indeed anticipates what Lacan would call the relationship between the "specular" I and "social" I:

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 3)

Johnson's ex-colored man is clearly as aware as Du Bois of this strange "twoness." "This," writes Johnson, in a passage that might have been lifted wholesale from The Souls of Black Folk,

is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates on each and every colored man in the United States .... He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man .... And it is this, too, which ... gives to every colored man, in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of dual personality; there is one phase of him which is disclosed only to the freemasonry of his own race. I have often watched with interest and sometimes amazement even ignorant colored men under cover of broad grins and minstrel antics maintain this dualism in the presence of white men. (Johnson 14)

The ex-colored man is the epitome of "two-ness": Like those "ignorant colored men," he maintains the color-line, veiling his "blackness" not under the cover of "broad grins and minstrel antics," but under a veneer of a constructed whiteness which, while rationalizable, is always open to his own profound questioning. What marks him as different from the colored men he mentions here is that his identity as a Negro who is "passing" necessitates not only that he must live the color-line with everyone else, but also that he must articulate it with every gesture, every utterance, every thought. Being the physical embodiment of the color-line complicates further his quest for a workable identity: Incapable of convincing himself that he is white, unwilling to accept what follows from being black, he is seemingly relegated - or, rather, unwittingly relegates himself, in complicity with a racist social dialogue that sanctions the relegation - to the zero-space between the poles of his and his society's constructions of race. To use Lacan's terms, in "passing" he becomes no more and no less than the face of the mirror - nameless, colorless, and invisible; to use Du Bois's, his is the voice of the veil, his role to articulate and give shape to the problem of the color-line itself. The central question of The Souls of Black Folk - How does it feel to be a problem? - an be answered only by the voice of the ex-colored man, speaking from the margin between the races.