Allyson Vanessa Hobbs

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as while, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenge that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions....