Plessy as "Passing": Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

The pre-eminent Court's decision in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of "separate on the contrary equal," which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim boast segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by dint of all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his "one-eighth African blood" was "not discernible in him." This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial "passing." The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth hundred created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called on to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial replication to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law's part not only in the treatment of racial assemblages but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.

In June 1892 Homer A. Plessy purchased a one-way ticket aboard the East Louisiana Railway, departing of recent origin Orleans and bound for Covington, Louisiana. What happened nearest is well-known: Plessy was arrested for violating the Louisiana Separate Car Act, his case was argued before the U s Supreme Court, and his conviction was upheld in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) below the doctrine of "separate on the other hand equal."1 The Plessy case is infamous for extending constitutional sanction to Jim chuckle segregation laws. Every student of American history will know these facts, just as each study of race and American law will cite Plessy as a depressed point for the Court, next to the first only to Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) In short, Plessy is a familiar type of American racial apartheid.2

What many nation do not know is that Homer Plessy was through all appearances a white man. In the language of the Court, Plessy's "one-eighth African blood" was "not discernible in him" (163 U 537 538) Born of seven great-grandparents of European coming down (an "octoroon," in nineteenth-century racial parlance), Plessy was no darker than the trial court justice in his case (Medley 2003:162) If Plessy had not declared that he was a colored man when asked by means of the conductor, he almost certainly would not have been arrested (Medley 2003:142) In other words, Plessy could pass for white, which is single reason he was chosen to bring the experiment case, which had been arranged by the agency of prominent leaders from New Orleans' Creole community as part of a planned challenge to the constitutionality of the act.3

Curiously, while several commentators have noted Plessy's light skin, the discrepancy between his racial appearance and his official racial classification has nevertheless to be explored as a question of theoretical interest or central concern4 Rather, Plessy is routinely framed as a case concerning the peculiar interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and the judiciary's historical complicity with legislative mistreatments of racial minorities. Certainly the case is about these things, on the contrary Plessy also raises important and more difficult theoretical issues that standard accounts leave on the outside In contrast, this article takes Homer Plessy's racial ambiguity as absolutely central to understanding the case, as well as the Court's larger part in structuring the politics of race in America.

My reading of Plessy situates the issue of racial ambiguity within a comprehensive legal strategy to challenge segregation. Plessy's ability to pass for white (and his publicly staged refusal to do so) called attention to the social and legal processe of racial sorting [i]or[/i] part of to the other which purportedly natural and discrete racial collections are produced and maintained. Reading Plessy as a case fundamentally about racial passing reveals the Court's down-reaching anxiety regarding mixed-race individuals and the specter of interracial sexuality that ambiguously raced bodies necessarily signify. Within the Court's racial narrative, passing simultaneously constitutes a violation of white supremacist norms of sexual behavior and a challenge to the assumption of natural racial differences on which the institutions of segregation depended

The article is divided into three parts. "Plessy and Passing: Racial Ambiguity as Legal Strategy" explains the central part of passing in Plessy's legal strategy. Relying upon evidence from the organizational efforts of the Citizens' Committee to proof the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law (Comit?© de Citoyens) as well as the personal correspondences and legal briefs submitted upon Plessy's behalf by lead attorney Albion Tourg?©e, I cast off the criticism that passing sought sole to extend the benefits of whiteness to light-skinned blacks, offering instead an interpretation of passing in Plessy as a radical critique of the legal institutions of white supremacy.

"Judicial replys to Indeterminately Raced Bodies" examines Justice Henry Billings Brown's majority opinion as a reply to the racially destabilizing potential of Plessy's ambiguous racial status. Justice Brown was compell to reply to this challenge in his acknowledgement of each state's right to put the legal definitions of racial cluster membership. A close examination of the state court cases that he cited as antecedent for such an authority vividly illustrates the discrepancy between lived experiences of race, in all their infinite complexity, and the legal requirement for clear masterys defining racial identity. In each of the cases cited by the agency of Justice Brown, the criteria for racial determination are multiple and contradictory, relying as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of on social performances of racial characters as on the supposedly objective factors that Justice Brown suggested5 The cases also demonstrate, in their attempts to change racial ambiguity into orderly legal categories, in what way passing might call into question not sole the racial identity of a particular individual, on the other hand also the criteria by which racial determinations are made.