Can social racial realism pass? Problems with ‘racial passing’ as an analytic category

Abstract ‘Racial passing’ is a category of practice: a category that non-specialists use to understand the racialized world. Should it also be a category of analysis adopted by race scholars? I argue that it should not. The use of passing as an analytic category requires that individuals have a real race underneath their apparent race. Attempts to determine an individual's ‘real race’ seem to inevitably involve a deference to norms of racial classification that are problematic at best, racist at worst. I argue that we ought to reimagine cases of so-called passing in terms of reracialization to avoid the reproduction of biological and racist classificatory norms. An individual may be reracialized—or reracialize themselves—without having some ‘real race’ from which they depart. I distinguish four forms of reracialization that have been conflated under the umbrella of ‘racial passing’.