By passing for black--making good on Jimmy's claim that "The Irish are the blacks of Europe"--the Commitments evoke a comparison with a film directed by John Stahl (1934), then remade by Douglas Sirk (1959). Imitation of Life shows how easy it is to pass for white and, in so doing, comes close to demonstrating that race is an effect of politics: a matter of acting or simulation.
Passing threatens the difference between "true" and "false," between "real" and "imaginary" (Baudrillard, 5). If "color" can be manufactured, the "color line" traversed, then race ceases to be imaginable as a fact of nature. It becomes a fact of politics.
Then again, Parker and Sirk only come close to this argument. Because they are content to exaggerate the radical separation of what is assigned ("I'm Irish," or "I'm a Negro.") and what is claimed or seen ("I'm black, and I'm proud," or "I look white.")--intent and effect--they ultimately rest upon a belief that "difference is always clear, it is only masked" (Baudrillard, 5). "Each sign . . . refers unequivocally to a status" (84).
To Parker, black skin refers to class, which is ineluctable. To Sirk, black skin refers to race, also ineluctable. Passing, for both directors is a type of counterfeiting (dissimulation--acting like one isn't what one is), not simulation (showing that being is a matter of acting).