In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our
past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided
into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of
DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the
frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the
color line has become clear.
In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the
stories of three extraordinary families from different eras of
American history to represent the complexity of race in America and
to force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The
Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry
who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the
Southern elite and, ultimately, to the United States Senate. The
Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of eastern
Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s
and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between
white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle
class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up
everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the
twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting
stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were
something to be believed, but not necessarily obeyed.
Defining their identities first as people of color and later as
whites, the families provide a lens for understanding how people
thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and
experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white
changed-over time. The Invisible Line will cut through centuries of
myth and amnesia and poisonous racial politics and change how we
talk about race, racism, and civil rights.
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