Watching Passing on Netflix reminded me of a reverse passing situation that got a lot of attention a few years ago, when a white woman named Rachel Dolezal was pretending to have both African American and Native American heritage while working as the president of a branch of the NAACP. I’m not sure why she was pretending to be a person of color, but in the period that the movie Passing is set in, 1920’s America, the repeated mention of lynchings in the film and the fact that she was raised by her white aunts and married a white dude make it a little more understandable why Clare was passing as a white woman.