{"id":20829,"date":"2012-02-24T22:02:55","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T22:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20829"},"modified":"2013-08-16T02:06:55","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T02:06:55","slug":"book-review-go-white-young-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20829","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Go White, Young Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Go White, Young Man<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Vanderbilt Law Review<\/a>
\nVolume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30)
\n10 pages<\/p>\n

Alfred L. Brophy<\/a><\/strong>, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law
\nUniversity of North Carolina School of Law<\/em><\/p>\n

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/a><\/em>. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.<\/p>\n

Sharfstein\u2019s<\/a> book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the color line separating black from white\u2014or tried and failed to. These case studies tell us what it is to be American\u2014how race is central to our identity, how we use race to take down opponents or to exclude\u2014and how the line separating black and white is sometimes porous. However, is not the story of race and American legal history about the ways that race is defined by law and by norms? Race mattered because people policed the line separating blacks and whites. That many states classified people with a small percentage of African ancestry as white suggests that it was possible to move across the color line. Still, the cases where the color line was policed, rather than crossed, are significant.<\/p>\n

Our nation\u2019s struggle with race is now about one-third of a millennium long. So there is a lot for Daniel Sharfstein\u2019s epic work of American history, The Invisible Line<\/em>, to engage as it sweeps across centuries\u2014from Virginia<\/a> in the 1600s to Washington, DC<\/a>, in the 1950s\u2014and as it details generations of lives, from humble farmers in Appalachia<\/a> to heirs of Gilded Age<\/a> merchants. Where most other people who have looked at such issues focus on the chasm between white and black, Sharfstein looks at people on the line separating black and white. He is able in this way to get at key\u2014and often overlooked\u2014issues, such as how people have crossed the color line in America and what efforts to cross and police it tell us about our national struggle with race and with equality.<\/p>\n

To detail the sine curve of attitudes towards race, Sharfstein offers three case studies of how racial categorization has functioned and how it kept (or attempted to keep) African-Americans in their place. The book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the line separating black from white\u2014or tried and failed to. Sharfstein\u2019s elegant prose illuminates how the color line functioned for people on both sides of it. For those who could do so, there were great incentives to claim to be white rather than black. In one era, race could define who might be a slave; in later eras, it was central to who could live in desirable locations, who could go to the most desirable schools, who could have access to the best government jobs. From statutes to social norms, African-Americans were told that they were inferior and had to maintain their place. Thus, those who might pass<\/a> for white\u2014those who had light enough skin color and perhaps the geographic mobility to mask their family history\u2014often did so.<\/p>\n

Some of the story of passing is well known. President Warren G. Harding<\/a> is said to have remarked in response to an allegation that he had African ancestry, \u201cHow do I know? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.\u201d Some of the best-known literature of the Jim Crow<\/a> era was about crossing the color line, like Nella Larson\u2019s<\/a> Passing<\/a><\/em>. And even antebellum<\/a> literature often addressed the crossing of the line from black to white. Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/a><\/em>, for instance, has a vignette about a light-skinned former slave who passed for white. Yet, even though we know that families crossed the color line (or attempted to), one wonders if the most important lessons from Sharfstein\u2019s book are the ways the line was successfully policed rather than the ways it was crossed…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…We learn a great deal about the policing of the color line in Sharfstein\u2019s book. Attempts to prevent passing sometimes failed, as in the Regulator Movement<\/a> and in the Spencers\u2019 Appalachia. In both of those cases, opponents of families who had once been identified as African-American unsuccessfully claimed that they were still African-American. But Sharfstein illustrates numerous occasions when the line was successfully policed: in Washington, DC, after Reconstruction<\/a>, when O.S.B. Wall<\/a> helped lead a western exodus movement; in the early twentieth century, when disfranchisement of blacks led to loss of representation in Congress and loss of civil service jobs, such as Stephen Wall\u2019s at the Government Printing Office; and when an heir to the Field fortune\u2014who, as a member of the Gibson family, had some African ancestry\u2014put on a display at the Field Museum about the races of mankind.<\/p>\n

We learn that statutes helped police the color line. For instance, statutes defined the blood quantum that permitted one to be considered white. Yet even when statutes defined one as black, social norms often classified a person as white. Sharfstein makes a bold statement about the porous nature of the color line in regard to slavery: \u201cThe difference between black and white was less about \u2018blood\u2019 or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white.\u201d<\/strong> This argument shifts the basis for being considered black from blood quantum to status\u2014though the two were often highly correlated…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Review: Go White, Young Man Vanderbilt Law Review Volume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30) 10 pages Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law University of North Carolina School of Law Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,1467,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[9753,9752,2766,2767,9751],"class_list":["post-20829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-alfred-brophy","tag-alfred-l-brophy","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfstein","tag-vanderbilt-law-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}