Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Book

Veritable Encyclopedia of the Ways Americans Dealt with the Issue of How Much Black Ancestry Should Go Into the "White Race"

If you enjoyed Daniel J. Sharfstein's THE INVISIBLE LINE: A SECRET HISTORY OF RACE IN AMERICA, this book is far better. While Sharfstein focused on three families, Frank W. Sweet has written a veritable encyclopedia of the various ways Americans dealt with the issue of how much black ancestry should go into the "white race" and what exactly makes a person "white." This book covers so much: the mixed-race subcultures of Louisiana and South Carolina as well as the isolated triracial communities throughout the South; the various court cases that determined whether individuals or whole families were on the "white" or "colored" side of an inhumane caste system; the fanaticism of "African American" elites in promoting and enforcing the "one drop rule," the surprising discovery that being accepted as white usually relied less on "drops of blood" than in conducting oneself in a way that met the behavioral and attitudinal standards of the local white community.

This book should be in every college or university classroom where the instructor purports to be teaching about racial mixture in the United States, mixed-race identity, or alleged "passing for white." Mr. Sweet, unlike too many historians, does not moralize, condemn or pass judgment on white mixed-race people who assimilated into the great white melting pot. We should respect the people who rejected the "one drop" nonsense, and we should thank Mr. Sweet for giving us this valuable and irreplaceable resource.