8 African American–Latino Relations in the 21st Century
“whiteness.” Some of the people who passed for white did so to help their
community—for example, the blond-haired, blue-eyed National Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Colored People leader Walter White was Afri-
can American. He lived his life as a black man who used his European-leaning
physical features to find information that aided the black community—but
there were others who proclaimed themselves as white for their personal
advancement.9 Rumors abound that some very famous people in U.S. his-
tory—like New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard; J. Edgar Hoover,
the founder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; former first lady Jac-
queline Kennedy Onassis (who reportedly had a “mulatto” family heritage);
and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton—were
people of African descent who used their predominantly European facial
features to pass for white. In her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial
Passing in American Life, Allyson Vanessa Hobbs describes how passing
affected the emotional lives of those who chose this route:
Passing offered countless freedoms—from the pleasures of sitting in
other sections of movie theaters besides the “buzzard roost,” to the
simple dignities of trying on a hat in a store without being compelled
to buy it, to the elusive opportunities to “feel more like a man” or “to
be treated like a lady.” But passing—the anxious decision to break
with a sense of communion—upset the collective, “congregative char-
acter” of African American life; it undermined the ability for tradi-
tions, stories, jokes, and songs to be shared across generations.10
For a large percentage of the Latinos who are now immigrating to the
United States, the opportunity to pass for white is relatively new. These re-
cent immigrants from Latin America were raised in nations where they
were taught that to be able to point to a European heritage (which boasted
of Spanish conquistadors and the heritage of European Enlightenment
learning) was better than claiming indigenous or African heritage. Blacks
were able to claim white privileges in Latin America, determined on a case-
by-case basis: the actual tonal quality of one’s skin was less of a determining
factor than one’s financial or social success. Brazil’s famed soccer star, Pelé,
demonstrated this in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Afro-Brazilian Edson
Arantes do Nascimento, or Pelé, was with his first wife, Rosemeri dos Reis
Cholbi, who is of European descent, they had two daughters and a son.
When their first daughter, Kelly Cristina, was born in 1967, Pelé and Rose-
meri infamously had Kelly Cristina listed as solely “white” on her birth cer-
tificate. Brazil’s Movimento Negro activists found this “white” posture for
the child of a major black athlete to be a betrayal. But Pelé became a key
