I hate to say it but....

I agree that it would be a very tough choice, and I think most people in that society who appeared not only white, but very beautiful on top of it, would have been at least tempted to seek out the advantages that life would offer them. I see Sarah Jane as a very tragic figure. She can't reconcile the self she sees in the mirror with the ethnic identity she is born with and which her mother is trying to instill in her.

In reality, the choice of "passing" also comes with many sacrifices...friends, family, the mental peace of living in truth...all must go, and would probably leave someone lonely and unhappy, and always on edge for fear of discovery. That's what Annie was trying to protect her from. But in the heat of a society that hates her for a racial identity she herself doesn't want to identify with, Sarah Jane can't see that.

The way she treats her mother is terrible, but it was because she wanted so desperately to be the person she thought she wanted to be, misguided though she was...and Annie held her to that other person inside she wanted to forget.

Sarah Jane, particularly Susan Kohner's interpretation of the character in the 1959 film, always makes me think of actress Merle Oberon. Oberon was most likely of mixed British/Eurasian/Ceylonese/Maori origin, making her easily the most multi-ethnic movie star of her time, and perhaps the first ethnically non-european to really be a full-fledged international movie star. Very beautiful women of non-white descent could be successful in films at the time, but usually in supporting or "character" parts, or as seductive, distinctly foreign "other woman" type counterparts to the white leading ladies...the sensational Chinese actress Anna May Wong, for example, became a minor screen icon doing this. But Oberon was a hugely celebrated, top-billed star in Britain and Hollywood in the '30s and '40s.

This was the life Oberon wanted, but in order to attain it and hold onto it, she had to sever ties to her family, and lie about her parentage and birthplace. In fact from India, Oberon claimed to have been born in Tasmania, presumably to white colonial parents. She deliberately obscured her past until the very end of her life, when she finally admitted that the Tasmania story wasn't true. In India, she was ostracized by classmates at her posh, white private school for her parentage, and an early boyfriend dumped her when he saw that her mother had dark skin. When her brother attempted to contact Merle in Hollywood, she refused to see him. She did continue to live with and care for her mother, but told any who asked that she was a maid. After her mother's death, she commissioned a portrait of her, but asked the artist to lighten her mother's skin tone. The woman Merle knew as her mother was in reality most likely her grandmother (her real mother gave birth at 12). She was one of the best stars and greatest beauties of her generation, and I admire her immensely, but I can never forget the tragic way she obtained phenomenal fame and fortune at the cost of living a lie for her entire life.

This story was dramatized by her nephew in a novel, and popular TV miniseries "Queenie" in the 1980s. Unfortunately, I haven't read or seen it.

We should never hide who we are, but when being yourself means being less in the eyes of the society you live in and seriously limits your options in life, well that would be a tough choice.

She didn't "pretend to be white". She was white, every bit as much as she was black. More, actually, because she looked white.