Nella Larsen's Passing is a complex response to and critique of the patterns of racial and class segregation that characterized the US in the 1920s. However, the critique has resonance for the modern period because, despite the demise of legalized segregation (sanctioned by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896) with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, racial and gender roles for men and women can still be said to be socially constructed and enforced at many levels. Feminist critiques of unequal power relations can be seen as a protest against socially constructed injustice that is the very content of social experience of marginalized groups, chiefly though not exclusively women.
Black feminist criticism adds the element of race to the discourse of social marginalization, in the process adding a layer of complexity to the analysis of social structures and power relationships in society, especially as they affect the experience of black women. As one black feminist critic puts it: "sex, race, and class interact to oppress Black women" (Smith 1413). More than this, they interact in subtle ways, perhaps too subtle for some critics to recognize, particularly when the text under scrutiny is written by a black woman and takes as its subject the experiences of black women. Smith continues:
There is not a developed body of Black feminist political theory whose assumptions could be used in the study of Black women's art. When Black women's books are dealt with at all, it is usually in the context of Black literature which largely ignores the implications of sexual politics. . . . A Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity (Smith 1413).
Passing presents three distinct views, from three distinctive black women, of the consequences of ...