Author Brooke Kroeger has just finished a lecture, "Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are," but Women's Center director Phyllis Freeman has the floor.
"How many of you know someone who is passing?" she said to the crowd in the University Union Potomac Lounge.
In a room of just under 100 people, 50 hands shoot up. That's at least 50 people who, as the title of Kroeger's book suggests, can't be who they are.
What is passing? In her lecture Monday night, the second of the Diversity Lecture Series, Kroeger defined the term as "when people effectively present themselves as other than who they understand themselves to be."
She began her presentation with a clip from 1934's "Imitation of Life," adapted from the novel by Fannie Hurst, whom Kroeger has also written an autobiography about.
"Imitation" is about two women, one black, named Delilah, and the other white, named Bea, who decide to raise their two children together in one household. Delilah's daughter, Peola, has a fair complexion, and is often mistaken as white. Growing up, she then assumes an identity as a white female, and goes to great lengths to preserve this identity, rejecting her warm-hearted mother in the process. This is an instance of passing.
In writing her book, Kroeger came across 40 different cases of people living in variations of how Peola did. She chose six to document in her book.
"I was interested in people that had a goodness to them," Kroeger said, "people that were honorable."
Of the people she spoke to, some had found themselves accidentally passing, while others had done so purposefully, like David Matthews, who was the centerpiece of her discussion.
Matthews was born of a Jewish mother and an African American father, Kroeger explained, but spent nearly his entire life with his father. His father gave very little detail about Matthew's mother, but David was sure that he was Jewish, Kroeger said.
With his limited knowledge, and mixed ethnic features, David went into the world identifying himself as a white, Jewish male.
"People often adopt physical, behavioral and mental characteristics" that defy cultural identifiers, Kroeger explained.
In conducting research, Kroeger asked the question, "What would make someone do this in our ostensively accepting society?"
She found that Matthews decided to pass because he saw it as a way to access a particular social group, where "not being allowed in was so much worse."
However, people pass for many other reasons; they pass to be in a different class, to fit in with a different sexual orientation, to attain a better life or job, among other reasons, she explained. Junior Kelsey Watts said the discussion made her realize how prevalent passing is.
"Brooke Kroeger's speech made me understand what passing is, and I realized that, in some way, everyone knows someone who is passing," the deaf studies major said.
People who pass do it for the same three primary reasons: "Safety, opportunity and adventure," Kroeger, who is also an associate professor of journalism at New York University, said.
However, in her experiences Kroeger has found that for people who are passing, "it becomes overwhelming to be living a lie-people do it for a period of time and then stop."
To begin her anthology of passing cases, Kroeger said she "put the word out in class, among friends, on the street, and it inevitably happened that everyone knew someone who was passing. It was like two degrees of separation."
After years of in-depth interviews and research, Kroeger now takes her book and her findings to lectures.
"This group grasped it [passing] quite well," Kroeger said of the Towson crowd. "Some people are very hostile about it. Examining identity is always hard because we like to label people."
She hopes that people walk away from her discussion thinking about "how identity is composed, how it's formed," she said.
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