Desmond Jagmohan was quoted in Boston Review:
Racial passing is not just a fictional device for interrogating the social construction of race and the cruelty of racism, of course; as historian Allyson Hobbs documents in A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (2014), it has a long legacy in the United States…But any ethical analysis of passing must take into account far more than its deceptive nature.
In a recent essay discussing Booker T. Washington’s “ethics of ambivalence,” for example, political scientist Desmond Jagmohan argues that although “we value truthfulness and sincerity and condemn deceit,” “these moral judgments hold true in a community of social equals. . . . the Jim Crow South was far from being such a place.” Washington believed that aggressive protest of Jim Crow would likely fail because of the economic, political, and ideological entrenchment of white supremacy; this is why, according to Jagmohan, Washington sought a more accommodationist route to achieving his ends: “that way forward required the use of concealment and dishonesty, political necessities of the dispossessed and powerless.” While Washington explicitly preached accommodationist policies in public, he defended ambivalences about them in private correspondence.
The full article is available here.
