{"id":60014,"date":"2020-07-27T00:46:32","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T00:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=60014"},"modified":"2020-07-27T00:46:55","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T00:46:55","slug":"dark-secrets-the-vanishing-half-by-brit-bennett-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=60014","title":{"rendered":"Dark secrets: The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dark secrets: <\/strong><\/em>The Vanishing Half<\/strong>, by Brit Bennett, reviewed<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Spectator<\/a>
\n2020-07-18<\/p>\n

Rabeea Saleem<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nBrit Bennett<\/a>. Credit: Getty Images<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half, A Novel<\/em><\/a> (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bennett\u2019s compelling novel explores the fraught subject of what it means to \u2018pass for white<\/a>\u2019 in a black community<\/em><\/p>\n

Pass\u00e9 Blanc<\/em> is the Creole expression \u2014 widely used in the US \u2014 for black people \u2018passing for white\u2019 to seek social and economic privileges otherwise denied them. Brit Bennett<\/a> has a panoptic<\/a> approach to racial passing<\/a> in this intergenerational family saga, which takes us on a 20-year journey into the lives of twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes.<\/p>\n

We meet them in the 1950s as children living in Mallard, a small town in the Deep South<\/a> known for its light-skinned negroes. For Desiree, the local obsession with skin colour makes little sense, since being light-skinned didn\u2019t save her father from being lynched by white men. In their teens, the twins run away to New Orleans<\/a>, but their paths soon diverge: \u2018Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.\u2019<\/p>\n

Fourteen years later Desiree is spotted back in Mallard with a \u2018blueblack\u2019 child in tow called Jude. She is an anomaly in a town where \u2018nobody married dark\u2019, adhering to the strict colour code of its mixed-race founder, who was determined that the town would see \u2018each generation lighter than the one before\u2019. Stella, meanwhile, remains estranged from her family and now lives a life of luxury with her white husband and their daughter Kennedy in an affluent, all-white neighbourhood in LA<\/a>. She has kept her past a secret from them, with her daughter realising how Stella would cite lack of money as an excuse not to discuss her background \u2014 \u2018as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything\u2019. Eventually, Jude\u2019s and Kennedy\u2019s paths cross, dismantling Stella\u2019s carefully constructed fa\u00e7ade…<\/p>\n

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

Bennett\u2019s compelling novel explores the fraught subject of what it means to \u2018pass for white\u2019 in a black community<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,369,8,6462,20],"tags":[30881,1438,31060,8781],"class_list":["post-60014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-louisiana","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-brit-bennett","tag-new-orleans","tag-rabeea-saleem","tag-the-spectator"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60014","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=60014"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60019,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60014\/revisions\/60019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}