Racechanging: various characters ‘passing’

Various characters ‘passing’

‘Passing’ refers to a person, classified by society as a member of one racial group, choosing to identify with a different group, usually by appearance.

The term was used especially in the US to describe a person of mixed-race heritage attempting to assimilate intoto white society.

The movies

Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins (2008): Sally (Erin Cummings), a guest on Roscoe Jenkins’s talk show, is a white girl who wants to be black; she thinks that her boyfriend is going to propose to her on-air but instead finds out he’s been dating her blonde sister. Debra Denson was the makeup department head. Erin described the character and the makeup in an interview:

I play a woman named Sally who is unhappy with her life and is sort of going through an identity crisis and decides that she wants to be black … My character is introduced on the show and has gone through this physical transformation. Her hair is in corn rows, and an afro. She’s been spending a lot of time in a tanning salon, so her skin is super, super, super dark. She’s gotten a botched lip job so I had to wear this weird bulbous prosthetic lip.

God’s Step Children (1938): Coming soon …