Alex Pretti moments before he is shot
Thursday
Since we learned that the two Border Patrol agents who killed Alex Pretti were Latino—which is to say, members of one of the communities that Border Patrol and ICE have been targeting—it’s worth revisiting once again how race operates in America. Three novels about race passing provide some insight.
First, some thoughts on the matter. Ever since reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and watching the biopic based on the book (Origins), I have a much clearer sense of the dynamics of race. Essentially, ever since slave times America has been signaling to the world that we have a caste system in which people of color, especially African Americans but occasionally other groups, are at the bottom of the system. Thus every immigrant group has seen it as advantageous to be identified as white. This has been easier for certain groups than others. (Noel Ignatiev’s study of How the Irish Became White tells how one formerly discriminated-against group pulled it off.)
One way to see Donald Trump’s success with Latino voters in the last election is that many were convinced that they had become white and would therefore be safe from his deportation crackdowns. Cuban Americans have long felt this way, but it appeared that other Hispanic populations were coming to believe it also. In some ways, Obama and Biden’s promotion of diversity and the success of DEI programs created a false sense of security. It has been one reason why Democrats’ optimism that the browning of America would favor them electorally has not panned out as they hoped.
Or not panned out until white Christian nationalists began aggressively asserting themselves. It has come as a shock to Hispanic, Islamic, East Asian, South Asian, and Jewish Trump voters that white supremacists will never accept them. As the supremacists see it, you can’t be American if your skin color or religious practices deviate at all.
Nevertheless, certain members of the targeted communities have believed that, if they aggressively embrace the racist stances of the extreme white, they will be accepted. One sees this in such figures as Jewish Stephen Miller, Indian American Dinesh D’Souza, and African American Candace Owens, as well as the murderers of Alex Pretti. The most fanatical advocates for racism are often members of targeted minorities.
Which is why race passing novels help us understand what is going on. Race passing is when people with characteristics that would cause society to put them in one racial category pass for members of a different category. William Faulkner’s Light in August, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Nella Larsen’s Passing all feature African American characters who successfully pass as white (although Joe Christmas’s racial mixture is never entirely clear). Each character pays a price for success but, more to my point, we see just how flimsy the distinctions are. Perhaps it is because they are paper thin, however, that whites spend an inordinate amount of energy in maintaining them.
Christmas is an orphan who is raised white but comes to believe he is of mixed ancestry. He feels so torn about this internal bifurcation that he shifts between racial identities, getting into fights with both Blacks and whites. At one stage in his life he attempts to flee from his whiteness:
Sometimes he would remember how he had once tricked or teased white men into calling him a negro in order to fight them, to beat them or be beaten; now he fought the negro who called him white. He was in the north now, in Chicago and then Detroit. He lived with negroes, shunning white people. He ate with them, slept with them, belligerent, unpredictable, uncommunicative. He now lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial.
When we first encounter him, however, his community thinks he is white, although it turns on him when it determines that he is Black, killing him in a grisly execution that includes castration. His killers react with extreme violence because the ambiguity of his identity threatens to expose the entire system.
In Human Stain, Coleman Silk is a light-skinned Black man who, when he passes himself off as white, is disowned by his family. He goes on to have a successful university career but then is accused of racism by two of his Black students. Although the controversy would probably die down on its own, Silk handles it badly because of his own vulnerability. The secret that he hides has left him in an identity limbo, which in turn leads him to resigning from the university.
In this novel about bottled up rage one finds this remarkable passage:
But the danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can’t stop. I don’t know anything harder to control than hating. Easier to kick drinking than to master hate. And that is saying something.
Claire in Larsen’s Passing has an internal struggle similar to those of Christmas and Silk. Passing for white, she marries a rich racist and is rejected by her childhood friends. She learns, however, that a life of luxury cannot compensate for the emptiness she feels, and she seeks out these friends and the Black community, even though she risks exposure. And in fact, her husband eventually finds out:
“So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!” His voice was a snarl and a moan, an expression of rage and of pain.
I can’t think of any stories featuring people of color brutalizing members of their own race, but the internal conflicts that tear apart the characters in Faulkner, Roth and Larsen’s novels give us an idea as to why such people might be prone to violence. Getting a ticket to whiteness is so enticing, and yet requires such internal sacrifice, that rage is a logical outcome. Indeed, the rage might burn particularly hot against whites like Pretti, who are defending the very people that his murderers should be defending. In their eyes, he is a race traitor, spurning the privilege that they have sold their souls to achieve.
In their guilt and anger, they unload their guns into his body.
