World: CROSSING THE COLOR LINE

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Few of those who are reclassified as blacks ever succeed in reversing the decision. An appeal to a special board costs $28, and involves exhaustive and sometimes humiliating questioning ("Why are your lips so thick?"). Coloreds almost never object formally to being reclassified as white, because of the social privileges they gain, and in many cases actually petition to have their racial status upgraded. Before reaching a decision, officials interrogate the applicant's longtime friends, employers, landlords, but never reveal to the petitioner what has been said about him.

The law itself is a hodgepodge of etymological and biological confusion in which the official definition of a "European" would seem ludicrous if it were not also tragic: "A white person," it says, "means a person who in appearance is a white person and who is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously not a white person, but does not include any person who admits that he is by descent a native or a Colored person."