Kurs:Hybridität/Filme

Television

• On the December 15, 1984 episode of Saturday Night Live, the black actor Eddie Murphy appeared in "White Like Me", a sketch in which he used theatrical make-up to appear as a white man.
• In 1985, actor Phil Morris played black attorney Tyrone Jackson on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. He uses make-up to pass as a white man and infiltrate Joseph Anthony's crime organization.
• In November 2005, Ice Cube and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker R. J. Cutler teamed to create the six-part documentary series titled Black. White., broadcast on cable network FX. Two families, one black and one white, shared a home in the San Fernando Valley for the majority of the show. The Sparks and their son Nick, from Atlanta, Georgia, were made up to appear to be white. The Wurgels and their daughter Rose were transformed from white to black. The show premiered in March 2006.
• In "Libertyville", an episode from the sixth season of Cold Case set in 1958, the actor Johnathon Schaech portrays Julian Bellowes, who's just married into a wealthy family in Philadelphia, PA. He has not told them he is a Louisiana Creole.
• A Season 8 episode of Law & Order titled "Blood" features a rich African-American who has been passing for white for his entire life in order to enter the most elitist circles is accused of killing his white girlfriend in order to give away their dark-skinned newborn baby that would expose him as being of African-American descent.

Film

• The 1934 film, Imitation of Life, featured the character Peola, who has mixed ancestry and is accepted as white.
• The films of Show Boat, 1936 and 1951, both had a character named Julie who was of mixed race, but passing as white. The discovery of her mixed ancestry sets off a crisis, legally and interpersonally.
• Pinky was a 1949 Academy Award-winning film on the topic.
• The 1959 remake of the 1934 film, Imitation of Life, featured the character Sarah Jane, who has mixed ancestry and is accepted as white.
• Melvin Van Peebles' 1970 film, Watermelon Man, tells the story of a casually racist white man who wakes up black and the impact this development has on his life.
• The 1973 film, The Spook Who Sat By The Door features a bank robbery conducted by an African American underground guerrilla warfare organization. For the robbery, lighter skinned members who with hair wigs pass as white are purposefully used. Witnesses to the crime describe them as Caucasian males, thus drawing suspicion away from the organization.
• Julie Dash's Illusions (1982), set in 1942, featured a woman in a Hollywood film studio who had passed as white to gain her position. It was named one of the decade's best films in 1989 by the Black Filmmakers Association.
• The 1986 film, Soul Man, features a white man who undergoes racial transformation to qualify for an African American-only scholarship at Harvard Law School.
• The 1995 film, Panther, features a black Federal Bureau of Investigation agent named Pruitt, who passes for white when among African Americans.
• The 2000 TV movie A House Divided, based on a Charles W. Chesnutt 19th c. novel, told the story of a mixed-race woman who was light-skinned enough to pass, and whose mother was a slave. When the woman's white father attempted to will his property to his mixed-race daughter, the family ran afoul of local laws forbidding property ownership by blacks.
• The 2003 film, The Human Stain, stars Anthony Hopkins as an African American man, a professor of classics who has passed as white for most of his adult life.
• In 2004, Marlon and Shawn Wayans were featured in the movie, White Chicks. Two black FBI agents go undercover as two rich white girls, and are accepted by the white people they come into contact with, including the girls' friends.
• In the 2008 film Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr plays a blue-eyed, blond-haired Australian method actor who undergoes plastic surgery to portray an African-American soldier in a Vietnam War movie within the movie.