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I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. It's known as passing. The centuries-old practice of light-skinned African Americans who can pass as white.

Objective escape racism and perhaps gain some of the advantages of white privilege. But it can come with a heavy price, not least a troubled conscience. Michelle Miller takes us back in time. So you haven't ever thought to? What? You ever thought of passing?

No, why should I? A new film about passing tells the story of two black women who live on opposite sides of the color line. This is my husband, John Beaulieu. Does he know?

It felt to me like the best way to make a movie about colorism was to take all the color out of it. The phenomenon of passing coming up on Sunday Morning. A friendship that started on the campaign trail has evolved into a real-life relationship, complete with a podcast and a book. Anthony Mason tells us about a duet, Barack Obama and the man known as The Boss. It's time for us to go. It looks like a buddy movie with a pair of unlikely co-stars. The question then is how do we look at each other and say we're in this together whether we like it or not. Let's figure it out. Yeah, the idea of creating a more perfect, noble America which is willing to wrestle with its sins and its trespasses is essential to the future of the country.

Later on Sunday Morning, Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen on friendship, the influence of their fathers and the state of the union. We swat them, spray them and then we scratch. David Pogue introduces us to a man with a new approach for taking on mosquitoes. Climate change was contributing to the spread of deadly mosquitoes around the world and there wasn't much we could do to stop them.

I learned that mosquitoes killed more otherwise healthy people than anything else on the planet. But a Google programmer had an idea for a novel solution that began with the construction of a robotically controlled mosquito breeding factory. You realize how sci-fi and weird that sounds. I really appreciate how weird it sounds.

Incredibly, the idea worked. Ahead on Sunday Morning, a different kind of debugging. Seth Doan catches up with Jane Goodall. In her 87th year, she's working hard to save the planet. Lee Cowan talks with the great one, Wayne Gretzky, about life after hockey and more. It's Sunday Morning, October 24th, 2021. And we'll be back after this. Passing.

Its roots are in the pre-Civil War South. Now, Michelle Miller tells us, a new movie, based on a nearly 100-year-old novel, explores this very complex subject. We've been looking everywhere for you. Are you talking to me?

It's been a theme in Hollywood for years. I'm your mammy. From imitation of life. Do I look like her daughter?

Do I look like I could be her daughter? One thing. To the human stain. When you meet the guy from Pitt, don't tell him you're colored, OK? Don't tell him.

Don't bring it up. You're neither one thing nor the other. And off-screen, the subject of passing, crossing the color line, is just as complex. The world perceives me as white, at least visually. Chicago lawyer Martina Hone says she's lived her whole life balancing her black mother's identity with her European father's privilege. Have you ever passed at any point in your life?

I've never passed intentionally. I have never thought to myself, I'm going to go in here and pretend that I'm white. You walk into a room, people assume you have the power of a white person in this country, you know, and that experience is not the same experience that most black people have in this country. So this is a family that is clearly black. You're just somewhat the exception. I'm just on the melanin-challenged end of the family spectrum.

Lisa Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other, and also Mixed Race. So there are all of the advantages that come with appearing to be white, right? You can get a cab, you're not followed in stores, but it also means others expose their racism to you. They do it in comments, they do it in behaviors, and you are witness to it.

That is me with my dad. She says passing describes when a member of a particular group is perceived as a member of another. I've talked to people who are gay who talk about being straight passing. No one they encounter will necessarily know the full breadth of their identity unless they choose to tell it to people.

And it is up to you to either disabuse them of that notion or to correct that or to challenge that or not. So you haven't ever thought to? What? You haven't thought of passing.

No, why should I? This week, a new film will put passing into the spotlight again. I'm trying to find out the history of the blonde you've brought along. Things aren't always what they seem. I began. Based on the 1929 novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen, the movie called Passing tells the story of two black women, one who actively passes for white, the other who does not. And this is my husband, John Beaulieu. Does he know? Rebecca Hall directed the film. It's saying it's about racial passing, but is it also about these other modes of performance, these other binaries, male, female, gay, straight?

Identity is this sort of cross-section between the story we tell about ourselves and the one that society tells, puts on us. Buenas días. Buenas días. Hola, Julio.

Julio. Best known for her role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Hall is making her directorial debut. I mean, I spent all the pre-production here.

To pull it off, she spent time in Harlem at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and filmed on this street. You know, everyone said it's too big a scope, it's too arty, it's too ambitious, it's too formal, it's too black and white, it's too all the twos. And here we are.

What have you told him? Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson are her stars. And you're happy? Of course, really.

As you say, I have everything I ever wanted. To have the privilege of ambiguity as a protagonist on screen is really rarefied as women characters, particularly women of color. Did it cause you to reflect on who you saw yourselves as? Oh, it's all, for me, it's about belonging. Everybody, every person of color or anybody who's marginalized or different, it's as simple as when you walk in a room, you scan it. And you do it unconsciously.

The two words for me, safety and belonging. Both actors say they've been faced with stereotypes of racial conformity. I've had that experience from various viewpoints of, but you're not really black or, but you're not black.

I mean, it's amazing what someone can do with the intonation of their one's voice, you know. I remember growing up this idea of like, you don't talk black, you don't talk like that, you know, which there shouldn't be a uniform idea. In terms of blackness. There's probably a time when we all engaged in some form of passing. Stanford historian, Alison Hobbs has written a history of racial passing in America. Perhaps somebody made an assumption about us and we went with it. Hobbs says passing dates back to the time of slavery.

First as a means of escape and survival. Then later on in the 20th century, in response to so-called one drop rules, which made it legal to discriminate against anyone with any black blood. Still some in the black community consider the act of passing as a betrayal of their identity. And remember passing wasn't always black and white. Someone who is from a lower socioeconomic status might decide that they want to pass as someone of a higher socioeconomic status.

A woman might want to serve in the military if we think about the period before women were able to serve in the military and might decide to pass as a man. During the period when Chinese people were excluded from coming into the United States, sometimes Chinese immigrants would pass as Mexican. Of course today with the world becoming more multiracial, Hobbs says passing is almost a thing of the past. Still there are lingering effects. The person who passed had to sever their relationships with their family, their friends.

There were very high emotional stakes to passing. Something director Rebecca Hall discovered firsthand. My grandfather was African-American and passed white.

Hall is the daughter of British director Peter Hall and American opera singer Maria Ewing. She says telling the story of passing also meant confronting her own family history, which included some uncomfortable conversations with her mother. Because I did pretty much all my life look at her and think, you look like a black woman to me.

But it was not something that was really spoken about. She then did tell me about some incidents of pretty ugly racism towards her and her father when she was a kid, and she told me that she asked him once, and he just looked at the floor and said, you know, I did it all for you. Hall unearthed the black heritage she says she's proud of.

And there are huge amounts of people, extraordinary people that did extraordinary things. Black people that were proud to be black. And my mother doesn't know that, you know, she didn't know her own grandfather's name.

Grandfather's name, sorry. This is emotional. You think they'd be satisfied being white? Who's satisfied being anything? Hall has dedicated her film. For all of us passing for something or other?

A 13 year long labor of love to her mother. Aren't we? I think I want it to invite a place of, that's about the gray areas. Often what's left for us to determine is who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. But I think it's the place of art to look at the shades of that in between.

Because if you end up being too rigid about who you think you ought to be, you turn into a powder keg. That's the moral of the story. Mosquitoes, those annoying insects that never seem to miss a barbecue, do a lot more than leave an itch to scratch.

But help is on the way, and leave it to David Pogue to find out about it. The deadliest animal on earth is not the shark, or the snake, or the scorpion, or even us. Can you guess? It's the mosquito, like the one in this model at the American Museum of Natural History. The diseases they carry kill over a million people a year.

And in the warming climate, they're spreading to new places. In 2013, a particularly nasty species arrived in Fresno, California, Aedes aegypti. She's evil. This is a female that will bite you multiple times.

She's very, very aggressive. Jody Holman works for Fresno's Mosquito Control Department. The one thing that you can say with great certainty is, we don't have any very strong methods of control for this particular mosquito. Of course, spraying insecticide kills mosquitoes, but that kills other bugs, too. So how do you solve a problem like aegypti?

That's where Verily comes in. What I wanted to do was a variation on something called the sterile insect technique. After nine years at Google, working on its Chrome web browser, Linus Upson wanted a bigger challenge.

And Verily, a Google sister company, was willing to fund his experiment. If a sterile male mates with a fertile female, she'll still produce and lay eggs, but they won't hatch. Each generation gets smaller and smaller, and you can actually completely remove mosquitoes from an area.

So Upson hatched a plan. Build a factory that churns out millions of special male mosquitoes, each carrying a harmless natural bacteria that makes him incapable of reproducing. Release those males to mate with the wild females with the EAT. A blessing, of course, and presto, the mosquito population plummets in theory.

Oh, wow. Pete Massaro, Google's director of automation, gave us a rare tour of Massaro's marvelous male mosquito making machinery. It's taking those now bags filled with food and L1 larvae. It's putting it onto trays. Those are going to then enter into the larva-wearing robot.

For the next six days, this robot will keep the mosquitoes warm, feed them, and keep them company. The females are slightly bigger than the males. The next step is to separate the boys from the girls using a glorified sieve. We're able to separate 97 to 99 percent of the males and females.

But 99 percent isn't enough. Releasing any females might make the problem worse. So this machine photographs each bug, studies the picture to determine the sex, and then blows away the females.

And that works. That has worked so incredibly well that, to our knowledge, no females have ever left this factory. Finally, these vans release the sterile males into the wild. Senior scientist Jacob Crawford was in charge of measuring the results. I very clearly remember a huge drop in the hatch rate.

I stood up and did a dance. I mean, that was our first field data showing that this could work. This could really work. It really did work. We got over 95 percent suppression of the wild population. Your first outing, it was that effective? And we hope to make it even more effective still by releasing over larger areas for longer periods of time. Debug Fresno ran for three summers, 2017, 18, and 19, and that was it. It was a three-summer prototype to work out the bugs. And the problem with the sterile insect technique is that if you don't keep releasing the modified males, the mosquito population bounces right back. So in 2020, sure enough, those traps started to light up again.

Those were heartbreaking conversations to have. I'm sorry. I know we had this really great, effective program, but it can't come back. But the Fresno test proved that Linus Upson's idea really works without chemicals, genetic engineering, or affecting any other species. Verily is now setting up the program in places where mosquitoes actually kill people, like Puerto Rico and Singapore. Of course, Verily is a Silicon Valley tech company. It's not doing all of this for free. The goal is to make this a sustainable business. The pitch to governments?

We'll get rid of your mosquitoes for less than your spending on the diseases they spread. It's been a strange, satisfying second act in Linus Upson's career. Wow.

I mean, it's not a web browser, right? It's nature. It's not all within your control.

Different kind of bugs we're dealing with. Talk about unsung accomplishments. David, who knew? And why do I have the feeling there's plenty more where that came from?

There is, Jane. That mosquito story is also episode number one of my new podcast. It's called Unsung Science. And each week's episode tells the backstage story of a breakthrough in science or tech from the characters who did the breaking through of Unsung Science.

From the characters who did the breaking through. Like the biochemists who figured out how to get the mRNA vaccines to work. Or the NASA engineers who got the rover to land on Mars all by itself. Or the storm chaser who discovered that something weird is going on with Tornado Alley.

Or the linguist who makes up the fake languages for Hollywood movies. It's all free at unsungscience.com or wherever fine podcasts are played. And if you listen to episode one, you can find out how that mosquito program is doing in Singapore. Over some 60 years, the legendary Jane Goodall has redefined our understanding of primates and the relationship between humans and animals. And she tells our Seth Doan she's only just begun. Come on, come on. It's how you might imagine Jane Goodall to be. Stop screaming at me.

We just met and we're setting up. But the famed naturalist was more focused on a visit from a robin than our camera crew. Oops, hello bee. She first learned about the bees and yes the birds here at her childhood home in Bournemouth, England. You grew up looking out on this garden dreaming of another world.

Yep, I did. And she found it in the Gombe rainforest of Tanzania where her groundbreaking work studying chimpanzees in the 1960s made her a National Geographic cover girl. At age 87, she can still be found on the front of magazines and running a conservation empire. Her Jane Goodall Institute dedicated to protecting wildlife in the environment has chapters in two dozen countries.

And there's Roots and Shoots, a program to engage youth around the world. Goodall's own fascination with animals started when she was a kid, spending hours in this tree with library books. I read Tarzan up there. There was no TV back then. That's when my dream began. I'll go to Africa, live with animals, write books about them.

That was it. No intention of being a scientist because girls didn't do that sort of thing. She started as a secretary then landed a job as an assistant to paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. He was on the lookout for a quote, fresh pair of eyes and fiery spirit. I clearly was passionate. I clearly had an understanding of animals and he felt that women might be better in the field, that we might be more patient. Also, he wanted somebody who hadn't been to college.

So he wanted an unbiased mind. Leakey raised money for Goodall to spend six months in the jungle studying chimpanzees in Tanzania. Little was known about them at the time. So these were your earliest observations? Goodall filled stacks of journals with notes.

I transcribe these every night. Wow, look at this 37, 38, 39, 40. Every minute you were noting the behavior. Crucially, she witnessed the chimps fashioning and using tools. Something believed until then was unique to humans. Did you realize that what you were seeing was so extraordinary?

I knew that it was going to make a huge impact. In fact, a lot of people refused to believe it. Why should they believe this young girl?

She hadn't even been to college. But editors at National Geographic were intrigued. They sent a photographer cameraman, Hugo van Leeuwenk. And when his film started doing the rounds, showing the chimps using little twigs to fish for termites, they had to believe. There was a directive from National Geographic to not only focus on the chimpanzees, but for Hugo to focus on you.

I know. Did that bother you? Well, it was frustrating, but, you know, you know, oh, Jane, you know, I want you washing your hair. Oh, could you wash it again?

I can get the light right. This is funny. In a wilderness boudoir, Ms. Goodall lathers her blonde hair with water pure enough to drink. It put me in a limelight that I did not want. But then there was all this press about, oh, she's only, you know, got money from the Geographic because she's got nice legs and things.

Did you feel objectified? It was just a different world. And so, well, if it's my legs truly that have helped me get money to study the chimps, thank you, legs. That photographer became her husband and they had a son together. And in her decades long study, those chimps also became much more to her.

Ollie, grumpy old JB, Flo with little Flint. It's almost like you're showing me family photos. Yeah, I know. Chimpanzees share 99% of humans' DNA. The difference Goodall points out is the development of our intellect. Which makes it utterly absurd that this most intellectual of all creatures on the planet is destroying its only home. That's your mission now? Yes, the effects of climate change, the hurricanes, the typhoons, the flooding, the fires. So the key important thing is to give people hope that we can get through because if you don't have hope, why bother? She's written a new book on hope and calls it a survival guide for trying times.

It's part of her race to reach as many people as possible. This planet, it doesn't have infinite natural resources. They're finite. They can come to an end.

So what's going to happen if we carry on with business as usual? Pre-pandemic, Goodall says she was on the road 300 days a year. Now she lectures and holds meetings from her room in the attic.

Virtual Jane, as she calls herself. Do you want to be this busy? No.

Really? No. Why do you do it? Because there's a message to get out and I'm getting older and there's less time left ahead of me and the world's falling to pieces. Do you feel this urgency?

Yes, I do. It means a lot of talking. Have another sip.

She says whiskey soothes her vocal cords. I don't want to turn into a couch potato. A daily walk soothes pretty much everything else. You can't just sit all day. It's ridiculous.

I can't imagine that you've ever sat all day. Not really, no. Hello, Seagulls. Here along the English Channel, it's again clear she's drawn to the natural world, but protecting that means shifting her attention. So now I have to speak to bankers and lawyers, CEOs and politicians. What do you say? I tell them stories. I try and reach the heart. People have to change from within. And that change, Goodall says, can start small.

Everybody can do something. I mean, when you go shopping, you can ask yourself, hmm, did this product harm the environment when it was made? Was it cruel to animals? Is it cheap? Why is it cheap?

Is it cheap because of unfair wages? You're asking people to do a lot. Well, why not? If they care about the world, if they care about the future, especially if they've got children, you don't have to do it all.

You know, even if you just pick one thing, like eating less meat, you just do something. It seems an unlikely pairing. Former President Barack Obama and the boss, Bruce Springsteen. Not so.

Anthony Mason explains how shared experiences can forge a friendship. Mr. President, you get to drive this? Let me tell you, this is one of the highlights of my time on this farm was getting behind the wheel of this mean machine. This is 1960, Bruce, right? 1960 back. And how old were you when you got this?

Twenty-five. And what did this mean to your life when you bought it? Everything.

Because it was all I got out of my record deal when I was 25 years old was this car and I got a piano. Well, we're going to try this out. Where's the key? Come on, Bruce. I will confess that the Secret Service, normally I'm good about alerting them, but... You just took off? Yeah, I just took off. And in the rear view mirror, I could see some of my agents running behind.

It's time for us to go. A rock star and a former president hitting the road. If it looks like a buddy movie, well, it's kind of become one. This friendship started really in 2008. You know, Bruce Springsteen decided to charitably help out some not very well-known new U.S.

Senator who had the audacity to run for president. Over time, that friendship deepened. I am the president.

He is the boss. In 1969, I was a 19-year-old kid playing in a bar in Asbury Park the night they landed on the moon. And last year, they sat down together for a couple of days here at Springsteen's New Jersey farm to talk about their lives and our world. When I look back on, you know, we were all idiots at the time.

Those conversations became a podcast and now the book Renegades Born in the USA. You describe the two of you as a little simpatico. I think Bruce, through his music, I tease him about how much better it is being a rock and roll star than being a politician. Which, of course, it is.

You do have the better deal. He does not really deny it. There is a certain sense of ministry to Bruce's music and his body of work is around these issues of, you know, who are we? That's the question. And what's important? We came here tonight because we want to build a house. What I do on any given evening when I'm doing my job well is I create a space of common values and shared narrative. For three hours, we create that place.

It exists somewhere. And when we build that house, we're going to use the bad wood and we're going to use the good news that's in here tonight. And that power of storytelling is, you know, at its best what good politics does as well, right?

It says, here's who we are. Here's a common story we share. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins of every race and every hue scattered across three continents.

And for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. You get a lot of nostalgia sometimes for 50s and leave it to Beaver and picket fences. And that was a genuine shared story, except it left a whole bunch of stuff out.

And a lot of people out. People like me were left out. I think where Bruce and I sort of overlap is that sense of it was necessary to revise the story, to make it inclusive.

People have got to recognize the country for what it is, its faults, its blessings. One thing that's interesting, I think a lot of people would look at this and go, what's a guy from Hawaii and a guy from New Jersey, black guy, white guy, what have they got in common? You both see yourselves as outsiders. You talk about feeling invisible here.

It might be the story of all artists and musicians that you start from the outside. When I was young, I felt voiceless. I felt invisible.

But I fought to find out where I belong. I joked with Bruce. I said, well, I don't understand why a kid from New Jersey thinks he's an outsider, because now I'm an outsider. You can definitely understand why Barack Obama is the outsider. What I do think we both shared was that sense of having questions about, well, how do we fit into the existing narrative?

How do we fit into the communities that we're born into? Partly because, Bruce, you talked about your dad being sick. My dad was absent. Well, you both talk about having essentially absentee fathers.

Yeah. And I think that can contribute to that sense of feeling like I don't know exactly how I'm supposed to behave or how I'm supposed to act. Well, let me ask you this, because you said something in the podcast, Bruce, that really struck me, which was that, in many ways, your work was really about your father. The more I look back on it, the more that's the conclusion I come to.

What were you doing in that? Well, in a sense, I was trying to be him. I tried to create a physical self that I thought he would approve of, have a success that I thought he would approve of. But I also felt a certain sort of that I was an instrument of revenge for the disappointments that my father had in his life. And so I started to intentionally tell these working class stories that were filled with both hope and compassion, but a lot of anger also. And I think Barack had a very similar, I mean, why did you become president?

Who are you trying to impress? Well, that was my next question. Do you think in some way your father's absence drove your ambition?

Absolutely. Yeah, my father was absent. He left when I was two. I met him only once, knew him for about a month. That's interesting how influential that month turned out to be. Well, that's right. I wrote a whole book called Dreams From My Father, a guy I didn't know.

How unusual was it to have an integrated band back in the day? In their podcast conversations, they touched on some tough subjects. I think, why is it so hard to talk about, Rayce?

Why am I pausing here, you know? For years, Springsteen's E Street Band featured Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011. E Street Band, Clarence Clemons!

The chemistry between the big man and the boss the big man and the boss is immortalized in newly restored footage of Springsteen's performance at the No Nukes concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979. You say in the podcast, in the book, that in many ways the most important story you ever told was you and Clarence on the stage together. It was not intellectual. It was emotional.

It was the language of the heart. But it was incredibly visual. It was more valuable than the stories I wrote in my music. In an ideal world, what Bruce and Clarence portrayed on stage was essentially a reconciliation and redemption. But most of your audiences were primarily white.

And they can love Clarence when he's on stage, but if they ran into him in a bar, suddenly the N-word comes out. And part of Bruce's music and part of my politics has been, no, no, you've got to surface that stuff. You've got to talk about it.

The sunlight is the disinfectant. And if you talk about it, then you can reconcile in a true way, not in a phony way, but in a real way. As we speak, you're headed to Virginia soon to campaign. Looking a year forward, how are you feeling about the midterms and how the president is doing? Well, look, I think Joe Biden is pursuing the exact policies that need to be pursued. Has he been able to bridge the polarization that we've seen building up over several decades now?

No, and in fairness to him, I wasn't able to slow that down as much as I would have liked, and certainly my successor actively promoted it. We're going to have to figure out how do we regain some sense of a common American story. And I think that is going to be a longer-term project. I think that's a 10, 20-year process. It's a generational process. The good news is that I think there is more of a common story among young people, but the older folks like us, we've got to get out of the way. Yeah, there's no going back.

We can be momentarily polarized, but at the end of the day, history is moving on. That's what I do. I'm an old man, but I can still do what I do. He's got bills to pay. It's a big farm. And surprising things can happen. Just look at the friendship of Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.

I think making friends as you get older in the later parts of your life is really rewarding, and it's a little bit rare. It comes from a different place, too, really. That's right. You don't want to end up being just a lonely old guy. Old man, that's right.

You know, that's the thing we're trying to avoid, right? Right. It's been a hell of a ride. Life is good.

Life is good. Thank you for listening, please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. New Hampshire is a surprise. In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.