Passing- Episode one

Our group members are Felice, Fanta, Ellie, Sania, and Henry, in the first segment of the series when we talked about the book Passing by Nella Larsen. We started our discussion with Fanta by sharing a brief summary of the book. Next, we shared our thoughts so far on the book while introducing ourselves. Overall I think we all had the same thoughts since there wasn’t much to go off of with the introduction chapter and critical forward, which is basically an analysis of the book and a deeper dive into the history behind it. The book overall is about two childhood friends reconnecting after many years. Main character Irene Redfield finds out her childhood friend Clare Kendry (who is light-skinned) has been living her life as white and married a very racist man. The two slowly make their way back into each other lives but the consequences might not be worth it. After that, we brought up questions and then analyzed them. The first quote is rather long but it starts off as “ We have seen that the mulatto…” found on page XXVI and we discussed that. Next, we talked about another quote on the first page of the Introduction chapter and the quote is “... and crossed over the color line to become white.” and then the last quote we discussed was “....a primary condition of passing in the United States has been ”. After we went further into analyzing those quotes we talked about any predictions we had. A few of us shared the same idea that Clare’s husband will find out that Clare isn’t actually white and bad things will happen.