What do you think?
Rate this book
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen―until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War―the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War―revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy despite its false foundations―and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen―until now.
The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War―the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War―revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.
To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy despite its false foundations―and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published September 14, 2024
41 people are currently reading
5967 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Lewis
14 books57 followersSarah Elizabeth Lewis is an art and cultural historian and founder of Vision & Justice.
Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
At Harvard, Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum. She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art.
Her published books and edited volumes include bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, translated into seven languages, Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and the “Vision & Justice” special issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth (Harvard University Press, 2024) and Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, 2025). Lewis’s article Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law, published in Art Journal (Winter 2020), won the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for “the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood.” An in-demand public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received more than 3 million views. She has had op-eds, commentary, and profiles of her work published in outlets including The New York Times, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe.
Lewis was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022. In 2019, she received the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African Americans.” Her research has received fellowship and grant support from the Ford Foundation; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Whiting Foundation; the Lambent Foundation; and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Lewis currently serves on the boards of Thames & Hudson Inc., Creative Time, and Civil War History journal, and is a member of the Yale University Honorary Degrees Committee. Her past board service includes Harvard Design Press, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Brearley School, and The CUNY Graduate Center. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, an M.A. from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. She is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University where she serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
At Harvard, Lewis pioneered the course Vision and Justice: The Art of Race and American Citizenship, which she continues to teach and is now part of the University’s core curriculum. She is the organizer of the landmark Vision & Justice Convening at Harvard University, and co-editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, launched in partnership with Aperture. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London. She also served as a Critic at Yale University School of Art.
Her published books and edited volumes include bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, translated into seven languages, Carrie Mae Weems, which won the 2021 Photography Network Book Prize, and the “Vision & Justice” special issue of Aperture magazine, which received the 2017 Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography. Her forthcoming publications include The Unseen Truth (Harvard University Press, 2024) and Vision & Justice (One World/Random House, 2025). Lewis’s article Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law, published in Art Journal (Winter 2020), won the 2022 Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association for “the best paper in the field of aesthetics, broadly understood.” An in-demand public speaker, her mainstage TED talk received more than 3 million views. She has had op-eds, commentary, and profiles of her work published in outlets including The New York Times, Aperture, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe.
Lewis was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2022. In 2019, she received the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African Americans.” Her research has received fellowship and grant support from the Ford Foundation; the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Whiting Foundation; the Lambent Foundation; and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Lewis currently serves on the boards of Thames & Hudson Inc., Creative Time, and Civil War History journal, and is a member of the Yale University Honorary Degrees Committee. Her past board service includes Harvard Design Press, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Brearley School, and The CUNY Graduate Center. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M. Phil from Oxford University, an M.A. from Courtauld Institute of Art, and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 7, 2025
3.5 stars.
Lewis’s central claim of sustaining a racial hierarchy requires us to see and unsee selectively because of the fallacies and dearth of evidence that shape white supremacy is profound. She supports it brilliantly with her archival and historical research in the arts, aesthetics, and culture. It obvious that this was a labor of love, curated with deep and critical thought, and designed to be an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social construction of society.
And yet, this book is just really hard to read. There were pieces in which her storytelling is superb, which helps crystallize some of the nebulous (and unfamiliar to me at least) concepts, but I found those moments few and far between. The structure of the chapters didn’t make a lot of sense; it seemed to mention something, explore something else, come back to the first thing while introducing three other things, and ending with something completely new. If this book was a ride, there would be flips, turns, and dips happening sequentially with no breaks between each and your stomach is unsettled for the rest of the day.
I take nothing away from her brilliant scholarship and the pivotal contributions to the arts and social sciences alike — it is obvious that Lewis is a mind of epic proportions. She tells the untold story of the Caucasus, Circassians, and the Caucasian War in a way that illuminates the irony (re: hypocrisy) of whiteness as the pinnacle of purity and power through intentional choices of seeing and unseeing. I just can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book. I enjoyed learning, but reading this was so laborious.
Lewis’s central claim of sustaining a racial hierarchy requires us to see and unsee selectively because of the fallacies and dearth of evidence that shape white supremacy is profound. She supports it brilliantly with her archival and historical research in the arts, aesthetics, and culture. It obvious that this was a labor of love, curated with deep and critical thought, and designed to be an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social construction of society.
And yet, this book is just really hard to read. There were pieces in which her storytelling is superb, which helps crystallize some of the nebulous (and unfamiliar to me at least) concepts, but I found those moments few and far between. The structure of the chapters didn’t make a lot of sense; it seemed to mention something, explore something else, come back to the first thing while introducing three other things, and ending with something completely new. If this book was a ride, there would be flips, turns, and dips happening sequentially with no breaks between each and your stomach is unsettled for the rest of the day.
I take nothing away from her brilliant scholarship and the pivotal contributions to the arts and social sciences alike — it is obvious that Lewis is a mind of epic proportions. She tells the untold story of the Caucasus, Circassians, and the Caucasian War in a way that illuminates the irony (re: hypocrisy) of whiteness as the pinnacle of purity and power through intentional choices of seeing and unseeing. I just can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book. I enjoyed learning, but reading this was so laborious.
April 19, 2025
Sarah Lewis will be speaking at the City Club of Cleveland in May, I saw this is her book and read the audiobook! She narrates it!
Her connects to social structures and culture help fill a gap with her premise! I will be watching the recorded City Club after in happens because I’m curious in further discourse!
Her connects to social structures and culture help fill a gap with her premise! I will be watching the recorded City Club after in happens because I’m curious in further discourse!
November 14, 2024
This book probably deserves a 4* rating, but it reads like a textbook for a college class that I don't have the prerequisites to take.
Read
November 20, 2024DNF ~15%
A little too academic for me right now, but the concept is super interesting.
A little too academic for me right now, but the concept is super interesting.
April 1, 2025
Lots of great information about race ideas in the US from about 1840 to 1940. A fascinating look at the idea of "Caucasians" and its collision with actual information about the Caucasus and its people in the mid 19th century. Terrible writing, with lots of unexplained academic jargon and lots of passages that seem meant to be arguments, and which I expect are largely true, but which lack supporting factual detail. For example, Lewis introduces the term "racial detailing" without defining it. I couldn't find any trace of anyone else using the term.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 15, 2024
A must-read.
November 2, 2024
I read this because she was fascinating on Brene brown. Lots of informative information on the injustice of America and race but dense at times.
November 3, 2025
4.75 / 2.5 stars on a split review of the two halves of the book, for 3.6 or so rounded up, overall.
The first half? Very good. The author notes that one of Tsarist Russia's wars against people of the Caucasus Mountains and foothills had produced new interest in their peoples as exemplars of "whiteness," since "Caucasian" was the normal term for the white "race."
The Circassians, in the 1850s and 60s, were, it seems, the first of these people to have a great number of displaced persons. Ultimate, in the US, that huckster showman, P.T. Barnum, put on an exhibit of "Circassian beauties." He stylized them to make them exotic, but exotic within their "whiteness," which was the attraction, even as the US Civil War was raging, then Reconstruction, etc. This all had the backdrop of the various Caucasian peoples, including an Imam Shamul, getting sympathy from the US.
Fast forward past the end of Reconstruction and into Jim Crow. Educated US white people have found out that Shamil is Muslim, not Christian, that not all people of the Caucasus are as "white" as they hoped and that other myths have been shattered.
But not totally shattered. Lewis notes that as late as 1919, rather than paying attention solely to the fallout of World War I (much of it caused by his fake neutrality in the run-up to US entry) racist, segregationist President Woodrow Wilson is asking for a government employee to get up-to-date photos of women of the Caucasus.
Intertwined is Lewis' study of Frank Duvenick's painting "A Circassian" from 1870 and other arts, plus the four or five alleged "races" of humanity, along with geography, and the post-Reconstruction education of African-Americans.
All very good.
Then, the second half. It drifts heavily into not just critical race theory, but critical theory in general, part of why a number of 3-star and below reviewers have talked about how academic it feels.
I've read in critical race theory in general, specifically Derrick Bell's "Silent Covenants" and Eddie Glaude's "History in Black," along with bits of gender-critical radical feminism and critical theory in general. It's not all bad, but it's not all good and yes, it's often dense. My thoughts here. A more extended review of "Silent Covenants," with a narrow focus, and shorter than the above, is here. Related? Even if ultimately derived from "reformed" Marxism of the Frankfurt School, critical theory in general has ultimately Marxist roots. My thoughts on the bad philosophy behind Marxism making it a pseudoscience and more, speaking as a non-communist leftist, are here.
So, IMO, Lewis should have gone lighter on critical theory in the second half of the book, and made what she did use about it less dense and less academic-sounding. In essence, she kind of smashed two partial books together into one and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
The first half? Very good. The author notes that one of Tsarist Russia's wars against people of the Caucasus Mountains and foothills had produced new interest in their peoples as exemplars of "whiteness," since "Caucasian" was the normal term for the white "race."
The Circassians, in the 1850s and 60s, were, it seems, the first of these people to have a great number of displaced persons. Ultimate, in the US, that huckster showman, P.T. Barnum, put on an exhibit of "Circassian beauties." He stylized them to make them exotic, but exotic within their "whiteness," which was the attraction, even as the US Civil War was raging, then Reconstruction, etc. This all had the backdrop of the various Caucasian peoples, including an Imam Shamul, getting sympathy from the US.
Fast forward past the end of Reconstruction and into Jim Crow. Educated US white people have found out that Shamil is Muslim, not Christian, that not all people of the Caucasus are as "white" as they hoped and that other myths have been shattered.
But not totally shattered. Lewis notes that as late as 1919, rather than paying attention solely to the fallout of World War I (much of it caused by his fake neutrality in the run-up to US entry) racist, segregationist President Woodrow Wilson is asking for a government employee to get up-to-date photos of women of the Caucasus.
Intertwined is Lewis' study of Frank Duvenick's painting "A Circassian" from 1870 and other arts, plus the four or five alleged "races" of humanity, along with geography, and the post-Reconstruction education of African-Americans.
All very good.
Then, the second half. It drifts heavily into not just critical race theory, but critical theory in general, part of why a number of 3-star and below reviewers have talked about how academic it feels.
I've read in critical race theory in general, specifically Derrick Bell's "Silent Covenants" and Eddie Glaude's "History in Black," along with bits of gender-critical radical feminism and critical theory in general. It's not all bad, but it's not all good and yes, it's often dense. My thoughts here. A more extended review of "Silent Covenants," with a narrow focus, and shorter than the above, is here. Related? Even if ultimately derived from "reformed" Marxism of the Frankfurt School, critical theory in general has ultimately Marxist roots. My thoughts on the bad philosophy behind Marxism making it a pseudoscience and more, speaking as a non-communist leftist, are here.
So, IMO, Lewis should have gone lighter on critical theory in the second half of the book, and made what she did use about it less dense and less academic-sounding. In essence, she kind of smashed two partial books together into one and the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
February 3, 2025
A book about how race is a fiction, the foundation underlying white supremacy in America is an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, and the visual arts have been used since Reconstruction to condition Americans to unsee this without noticing that we are unseeing it.
I would love to see a concise outline of the book, because I am unable to construct one from having read it. The ideas are sharp but actually reading the book was tough. It’s pretty academic and prone to burying (or sometimes never outright stating) the lede. I still do not understand what the point was of the chapter discussing Frank Duveneck’s work (which was a fifth of the book).
A few things I learned:
- Frederick Douglass was obsessed with photography as a new lever by which ordinary people could exert control over visual narratives and thus cultural narratives
- Woodrow Wilson systematically resegregated the federal workforce (this is not new to this book but I didn’t know it)
- There is a sculpture currently in possession of the Whitney Museum that was originally called “The N-word” and was just straight up renamed “The Ethiopian” and their catalog makes no mention of the original name
I would love to see a concise outline of the book, because I am unable to construct one from having read it. The ideas are sharp but actually reading the book was tough. It’s pretty academic and prone to burying (or sometimes never outright stating) the lede. I still do not understand what the point was of the chapter discussing Frank Duveneck’s work (which was a fifth of the book).
A few things I learned:
- Frederick Douglass was obsessed with photography as a new lever by which ordinary people could exert control over visual narratives and thus cultural narratives
- Woodrow Wilson systematically resegregated the federal workforce (this is not new to this book but I didn’t know it)
- There is a sculpture currently in possession of the Whitney Museum that was originally called “The N-word” and was just straight up renamed “The Ethiopian” and their catalog makes no mention of the original name
October 23, 2025
The premise is 5 stars, with meticulous research. The telling of it was academically above my head at times and also, I probably wasn’t always in the best mood to read about more ways racial separation and hierarchy were perpetrated. Sarah Lewis interviews have been interesting listens, she’s a thoughtful brainiac, but I struggled to keep up in the book. I felt like I did in college when I needed the professor to help me make more sense of the reading.
Read
March 18, 2025This is an important record of the propaganda and misrepresentation that fed American racism after the Civil War. Dr. Sarah Lewis has collected the evidence, records and photographs that tell a new story about visual representation and geography. It's mind-blowing to recognize all the intentional ways racial systems are built and reinforced.
November 26, 2025
The scariest things are most often times the things we don’t see. Now imagine the scary things are real, and you have to go looking for shadows.
Sarah Lewis does nothing short of an extensive review of everything we don’t see, and everything that isn’t there, showing us exactly how ugly those monsters are.
Sarah Lewis does nothing short of an extensive review of everything we don’t see, and everything that isn’t there, showing us exactly how ugly those monsters are.
July 31, 2024
great
October 18, 2024
Minuteman. Skimmed. Wish I'd had more time. Hard to dig out its points.
Read
May 12, 2025not what I was originally expecting but interesting nonetheless. will need to reread soon with a physical copy instead of the audiobook to really let it all sink in
February 13, 2025
An academic examination of racial hierarchy through art and how we unsee what is right before us. I listened to the Dreamscape production on HOOPLA, which didn’t include the art, that made the text almost incomprehensible. Additionally, the author/narrator’s cadence was quite uneven, making listening a bit tedious.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews