Passing | Official Trailer | Netflix

Before you question this . . .

YES, it did happen and still does . . . Blacks passing!

I can’t wait to see this!!! ~V

Synopsis:

Adapted from the celebrated 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen, PASSING tells the story of two Black women, Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and Clare Kendry (Academy Award nominee Ruth Negga), who can “pass” as white but choose to live on opposite sides of the color line during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in late 1920s New York.

After a chance encounter reunites the former childhood friends one summer afternoon, Irene reluctantly allows Clare into her home, where she ingratiates herself to Irene’s husband (André Holland) and family, and soon her larger social circle as well.

As their lives become more deeply intertwined, Irene finds her once-steady existence upended by Clare, and PASSING becomes a riveting examination of obsession, repression and the lies people tell themselves and others to protect their carefully constructed realities.

Passing | Official Trailer ~ Video via Netflix

On Netflix November 10th.

Nella Larsen (1891-1963)

Contributed by: Doris Richardson Johnson

Nella Larsen, nurse, librarian, and, writer, was born Nella Marie Larsen in Chicago in 1891 to a Danish mother and a black West Indian father. Knowing little about her father after his death when she was two years old, she was reared in the home with her mother, remarried to a Danish man, and her half-sister. Larsen attended school in all white environments in Chicago until 1906-1907, when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee to attend high school at Fisk University’s Normal School. This was her introduction to a predominantly black environment.

After completing the year at Fisk, Larsen journeyed to Denmark where she spent three years (1909-1912) with relatives and audited courses from the University of Copenhagen. Returning to the United States, she entered a three-year course of study at Lincoln Hospital Training School for Nurses in New York City.

Larsen later practiced nursing from 1915 to 1921 at John A. Andrew Hospital and Nurse Training School in Alabama and the City Department of Health in New York. On May 3, 1919, Larsen married Dr. Elmer Samuel Imes, a black physicist who became the chairman of the Physics Department at Fisk University.

From 1922 to 1926, Larsen served as a librarian at the New York Public Library. After resigning from this position, she began her literary career by writing her first novel, Quicksand (1928). Meshing autobiography and fiction in order to explore the psychology of racial dualism and marginality on black middle class women, Quicksand won Larsen the Harmon Foundation’s bronze medal (second prize) and secured her a position as an important literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance.