He has a Black father (his mother is absent and never mentioned). Enter Aaron, a pale-skinned, straight-haired teen with a Post Malone poster and Logan Paul signed shirt on his bedroom walls. This week on Atlanta, in an episode shot entirely in black-and-white à la Rebecca Hall’s recent Netflix adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing, the figure of the white-passing Black protagonist appears once more, this time, on less eloquent (or interesting) terms. At the novel’s end, Blackness reemerges, even as it has been disavowed, as the “great secret” of his life - a confidence that in keeping assured he’d be free to live in the world whilst his interiority turned to rot. Still, as he considers his life in old age, The Ex-Colored Man cannot shake his deep sorrow and loss at his sacrifice, which his children will never know of. And though this life is unglamorous, it is without the gratuitous violence he knew of Black life in the South. Living as a white man, he keeps death at bay, becomes an average businessman, marries a white woman, and raises his children to believe they are unquestionably white. In James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a fictional story unfolds about an unnamed mixed-race Black man from a small Georgia town who decides to “pass” for white after witnessing a lynching.
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