History Main / PassFail

* Nella Larsen's 1929 novel ''Passing'' is entirely about examining this phenomenon-it contains three "black" women, one who has basically switched to a white identity by continuously passing, one that can pass, but doesn't, and one who passes occasionally out of convenience. [[spoiler:It does not work out well for the first two in the end.]]

-> ''“Those mixed bloodlines were always lurking, waiting to peek out, and fear of losing their status kept white people in line. If two white people had a child, and the government decided that the child is too dark, even if both parents produced documentation proving they were white, the child could be classified as colored, and the family had to make a decision. Do they give up their white status to live as colored people in a colored area? Or would they split up, the mother taking the colored child to live in the ghetto while the father stayed while to make a living to support them? Many colored people lived in this limbo, a true purgatory, always yearning for the white fathers who disowned them, and they could be horribly racist to one another as a result.”''

* Adam in ''Series/{{Degrassi}}'' has some trouble coming across as a guy, particularly in his early appearances. Played with an element of CringeComedy. Booyah!

--> My father was a [[ButNotTooBlack mulatto]], my grandfather a Negro,[[note]]Though he actually never had a Black grandfather — his mulatto father's Black genes came from his grand''mother'''s side, and his paternal grandfather was [[BlueBlood a Marquess]] — the Dumas family was one of the most famous products of the French colonial system of ''plaçage'', where the white plantation owners often had huge black harems, but tend to acknowledge the mixed-race children born of such unions as their legal heirs.[[/note]] and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts [[InsultToRocks where yours ends]].

* The North used this trope during the Civil War to drum up support for their side among the British and other Europeans. They distributed flyers with the pictures of beautiful blonde, blue-eyed little girls who were slaves in the South solely because they were one-sixteenth or one-thirty-second black, and pointed out that if the South won, those girls would end up having to service their masters in the same way that black women did. The ValuesDissonance in this campaign ("if the South wins these [[MissingWhiteWomanSyndrome pretty white girls]] are going to be sexually abused!") means that not many modern people have heard of it.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism Crypto-Judaism]], where Jews pretended to have converted to Catholicism but secretly practiced Judaism, is believed to have been widespread in post-Reconquista Spain as well as other parts of Europe. Many Crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal supposedly came to the New World as conquistadores. At least some, such as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Carabajal_y_Cueva Luis Carvajal]], the governor of Nuevo Leon, were tried for heresy by the Mexican Inquisition, and died in prison or executed.

* Gay actors and musicians of yesteryear were all but required to pass as straight. Rock Hudson is one of the more famous examples. Liberace was also [[ArmoredClosetGay adamant in keeping his sexuality under wraps]] as well, and his estate went to great lengths to cover up that he died from AIDS related complications.

* Most humanoid cryptids (or therianthropes, who can shapeshift into a human form) in ''Literature/InCryptid'' pass as humans because [[VanHelsingHateCrimes the Covenant of St. George]] is dedicated to exterminating them. For instance, gorgons wear wigs to cover their snake hair, and [[BigfootSasquatchandYeti Sasquatch]] have learned to love depilatory products and mail-order shoe catalogs. Several cryptids travel with the carnival in ''Magic For Nothing'' because they're less out-of-place somewhere people already expect to see "freaks".

-->-- '''Creator/TrevorNoah''', ''Literature/BornACrime''

* Prince Edward and Tom Canty, a pair of {{Identical Stranger}}s, take on each other's identities in the ''Literature/ThePrinceAndThePauper''.

[[folder: Film]]

** In the ''TabletopGame/{{Eberron}}'' campaign setting, some members of the shape-shifting Changeling race try to avoid the distrust other humanoids have for their kind by creating a single false identity for themselves and living as members of a different humanoid races. These individuals are known among Changelings as "passers". This is in contrast to "becomers", who maintain multiple identities of varying races, or simply create, steal, and abandon identities whenever they find it convenient or amusing; and "truthseekers", who live openly as changelings and only rarely use their shapeshifting abilities.
** Both passers and truthseekers can sometimes hit something like the gender variety -- Changelings are born with a biological sex, which is what someone looking at them with magic that sees through shapeshifting would see (leaving aside more mundane passing), but if they shapeshift to another sex it is thorough enough to get pregnant or impregnate regardless of their birth sex.

* An episode of ''Series/JustShootMe'' inverted the SVU example above, with Elliot's brother having spent ''years'' posing as mentally disabled due to a head injury as a child to get out of having to support himself. He's outed only after Jack's foolishness causes a RantInducingSlight.

-> ''“Those mixed bloodlines were always lurking, waiting to peek out, and fear of losing their status kept white people in line. If two white people had a child, and the government decided that the child is too dark, even if both parents produced documentation proving they were white, the child could be classified as colored, and the family had to make a decision. Do they give up their white status to live as colored people in a colored area? Or would they split up, the mother taking the colored child to live in the ghetto while the father stayed white to make a living to support them? Many colored people lived in this limbo, a true purgatory, always yearning for the white fathers who disowned them, and they could be horribly racist to one another as a result.”''

* Actress Merle Oberon hid her mixed race parentage, and birth in Mumbai India, throughout her entire career, claiming to have been born in Tasmania Australia. That her claimed early life was a total fabrication didn't become known until after her death, and her actual parentage is still somewhat in doubt.

** Homer Adolph Plessy of Plessy v Ferguson fame was 12.5% black and 87.5% white. In fact the reason he was involved in the case in the first place was not to allow blacks to be in whatever rail cars they wanted, but rather to show that a racially based system was stupid since things are not so simple when it comes to race. The US-SC didn't see it that way. In fact, in a case of NiceJobBreakingItHero, many Southern states began adopting "one-drop rule" as the law governing race because this case showed that defining race based on ancestry and "blood quantums" led to ambiguous cases, as per Mr. Plessy. (Because of the difference in laws, Mr. Plessy would have been considered white in some states but black in others, including his home state of Louisiana.)

** Defied by Fredi Washington - who played Peola in ''Imitation of Life'' mentioned above. She frequently had to fight off claims that she had tried to pass. She was in fact an avid civil rights activist after she retired from films.

* As recounted in ''Series/IAmTheNight'' and the podcast ''Root Of Evil'' a woman named Fauna grew up believing she was mixed white and black and had been adopted by a black woman, only to discover as an adult after tracking down her birth mother Tamar that this wasn't true. What's worse, her father was likely Tamar's own father George Hodel (considered a likely suspect in the murder of the Black Dahlia) making her a product of ParentalIncest.

* In the podcast ''Root Of Evil'' a woman named Fauna grew up believing she was mixed white and black and had been adopted by a black woman, only to discover as an adult after tracking down her birth mother Tamar that this wasn't true. What's worse, her father was likely Tamar's own father George Hodel (considered a likely suspect in the murder of the Black Dahlia) making her a product of ParentalIncest.

* In the ''TabletopGame/{{Eberron}}'' campaign setting of ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', some members of the shape-shifting Changeling race try to avoid the distrust other humanoids have for their kind by creating a single false identity for themselves and living as members of a different humanoid races. These individuals are known among Changelings as "passers". This is in contrast to "becomers", who maintain multiple identities of varying races, or simply create, steal, and abandon identities whenever they find it convenient or amusing; and "truthseekers", who live openly as changelings and only rarely use their shapeshifting abilities.

* ''Series/CarnivalRow'': Philo, who's half Faerie, passed as wholly human for most of his life. It's revealed his Faerie mother insured this by having his wings surgically removed when he was an infant. After he discloses this to his lover Portia, she throws him out in disgust, and soon his life falls apart when his police colleagues find out, since they view it as a disgrace, while suspecting him of murdering people to conceal it as a result.

* In his book ''The Color of Water'', James McBride tells the story of his mother, the wife of a Black Baptist minister and a committed Christian, who called herself Ruth and identified herself as a light-skinned Black woman. He eventually learned that her birth name was Rachel Deborah Shilsky and that she was a white woman and the daughter of a rabbi, raised as an Orthodox Jew. Besides invoking this trope, she was likely playing with it in that the name Ruth is often given to female converts to Judaism, based on the eponymous heroine of the Biblical book of Ruth.

It reflects many racial ideas still present (if now, less explicit) in 'Western' societies, including many European countries and their post-colonial offshoots, such as Australia, Brazil, and Canada. It's perhaps most prominent in South Africa and the United States, which both have troubled histories of race relations due to their histories of expelling, enslaving, and/or sexually exploiting their native populations (and in the US case, enslaving and sexually exploiting Africans as well). Both countries also instituted [[OneDropRule "One-Drop Rules"]], which stated that 'one drop' of non-European blood made a person non-white and thus deprived them of the rights of a full citizen. Securing these rights would require "passing" as a member of the dominant racial group. However, there is always the chance -- and thus, always the fear -- of revealing one's MixedAncestry.

* In ''Fanfic/MarriedToTheFlames'', Jin notices her boyfriend Li is a firebender when she kisses his neck and notices [[MyBloodRunsHot he's abnormally warm]]. This, combined with his gold eyes (which she originally chocked up to MixedAncestry), lets her realize that Li's a firebender.

* In his book ''The Color of Water'', James McBride tells the story of his mother, the wife of a Baptist minister and a committed Christian, who called herself Ruth and identified herself as a light-skinned Black woman. He eventually learned that her birth name was Rachel Deborah Shilsky and that she was a white woman and the daughter of a rabbi, raised as an Orthodox Jew. Besides invoking this trope, she was likely playing with it in that the name Ruth is often given to female converts to Judaism, based on the eponymous heroine of the Biblical book of Ruth.

* A substantial number of Jews in Nazi Germany passed as gentiles successfully. While it remains unknown whether some wilder theories are true (i.e. Adolf Hitler or Heinrich Heydrich being secret Jews), there are better documented cases of Jews in unlikely places, such as the case of [[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world-war-ii-a-jew-in-the-ss-a-327936.html SS officer Eleke Scherwitz]], a Jewish concentration camp commandant in Latvia. He was put on trial for war crimes in 1948, after his past as a concentration camp commandant was found out while he was trying to pass as a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe (which he technically was). However, some (such as Anita Kugler, the author of a recent German book about him) contend that he saved many lives using his position as a high ranking SS officer.

* Neurodiverse people sometimes try to pass for neurotypical, especially autistic individuals ('masking').