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Page 216
with which they can sidestep any confrontation. At one hospital, for example, a patient came in who was unconscious and looked neither European nor coloured, but was somewhere in between. The hospital authorities wavered on whether to put her in a European or a coloured ward, and finally put her alone in a side wardin a living architecture of a residual category.
Watson (1970, 59) hypothesizes that those who successfully pass as white interact "segmentally with members of the superordinate group, thus allowing the superordinate-group members leeway in which innumerable ad hoc decisions cumulatively favorable to the aspirant can be made." The person wishing to pass for white manages a kind of shell-game sequence: first obtain employment in a whites-only occupation that is not too fussy about identity cards (such as being a tram director). The next step is to move to a mixed neighborhood, and quietly join local white associations. Working with the fact that even racist whites may find it difficult to confront a person face-to-face as passing, pass-whites are able to manage many face-to-face interactions such as attending white churches. Over time, this establishes a track record that can be used as leverage for reclassification based on general acceptance and repute. With possession of a white identity card, the person has the nominal protection of the law.
The more rigid the system of racial segregation and inequity, the more important passing became to those living in the categorical borderlands. At the same time, with the rise of the black consciousness movement in South Africa in the 1970s, a new ideology of black unity across black African, Asian and coloured lines became powerful there. In an 1975 article, Unterhalter (1975, 61) notes that most coloured people that she surveyed had disapproved of passing. This disapproval was based primarily on the need to remain loyal to the Coloured group. This contrasted with studies done twenty years earlier, where the harmful effect of passing as white on families was the primary reason (Watson 1970, 61). Negative attitudes toward black Africans who try to pass for coloured remained unchanged.
Given the disparities in power and privilege, it is not surprising that so many coloured people wanted to pass as white. Because passing is a partially secret, interactive process, and because it does require ad hoc mixtures of prototypical classifying and confrontations with Aristotelian categories of law, it is a crucible for the issues discussed throughout this book. Another kind of implosion (Haraway 1997) occurs where people try to be reclassified, or who fall in other ways between the categorical imperatives of apartheid.

 
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