But what does it mean to "pass"? And what effect does passing have, in the longer term, on a relationship and on a person's psyche?

Until a recent trip with my husband to South Africa, my understanding of the harms caused by passing came primarily through my research on interracial family law, and in particular through the tragic love story of Alice Beatrice Rhinelander and Leonard Kip Rhinelander, to which I devoted the first half of my recent book.

Alice Beatrice (Jones) Rhinelander was a working-class chambermaid who in the fall of 1921 met and fell in love with Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a wealthy white man who descended from the French Huguenots and was an heir to millions of dollars. After three years of dating, Alice and Leonard got married on October 14, 1924. However, unlike most weddings involving a member of New York high society, there was no wedding announcement about or celebration for this Rhinelander union. Instead, Alice and Leonard went to great lengths to keep their marriage a secret, choosing to live in the very modest home of Alice's parents, British immigrants George Jones, a "mulatto" or "colored" man who worked as a taxi driver, and Elizabeth Jones, his white wife.

Despite the Rhinelanders' best efforts at hiding their marriage, their secret was exposed. On November 13, 1924, the Standard Star of New Rochelle ran a story with the title "Rhinelanders' Son Marries Daughter of a Colored Man." Thereafter, reporters swarmed the house of the Rhinelander newlyweds in an attempt to uncover the mystery of Alice's race and the cross-class marriage of a member of one of New York's most elite families. Two weeks later, Leonard filed for annulment of his marriage to Alice. Leonard argued that Alice had committed fraud that made their marriage void by both falsely telling him she was white and failing to inform him that she was of "colored blood."

According to newspaper reports and the arguments by Alice's lead trial attorney, Lee Parsons Davis, Leonard and Alice were actually madly in love. The story was that Leonard filed the lawsuit only because of his father, who refused to accept Alice as part of the family, and that Leonard told Alice to fight the case to ensure that they could be together as husband and wife. But in 1920s New York, what did Leonard's request mean? New York did not have a law that banned interracial marriages, but socially speaking, Alice and Leonard could not be together unless she, too, was white. Consequently, everyone expected Alice to litigate her whiteness. Yet Alice surprised everyone when she did not attempt to prove her whiteness at trial. She did not try to prolong the snapshot moments in which she had previously passed as "white" in places like the hotels she frequented with Leonard and even at the government office where she and Leonard obtained their marriage license. Rather, Alice admitted that she was of "colored descent." Moreover, she argued that Leonard was aware of her race before the marriage.