Everybody passes. not only racial minorities. As Marcia Dawkins explains, passing has been happening for millennia, when you consider that intercultural and interracial touch started. And with this profound new examine, she explores its outdated limits and new chances: from ladies passing as males and able-bodied individuals passing as disabled to black classics professors passing as Jewish and white supremacists passing as white.

Clearly Invisible trips to occasionally uncomfortable yet unfailingly enlightening locations as Dawkins retells the modern expressions and ancient studies of people known as passers. alongside the best way those passers turn into people—people whose tales sound commonplace yet take refined turns to bare racial and different tensions lurking underneath the skin, those who finally divulge as a lot approximately our tradition and society as they disguise approximately themselves.

Both an up to date tackle the background of passing and a realistic account of passing’s results at the rhetoric of multiracial identities, Clearly Invisible strains passing’s criminal, political, and literary manifestations, wondering even if passing could be a type of empowerment (even whereas implying secrecy) and suggesting that passing might be one of many first expressions of multiracial id within the U.S. because it seeks its personal social standing.

Certain to be hailed as a pioneering paintings within the learn of race and tradition, Clearly Invisible deals robust testimony to the truth that person identities are by no means absolutely self-determined—and that race is much extra an issue of sociology than of biology.