What do you think?
Rate this book
Invisible Blackness: A Louisiana Family in the Age of Racial Passing
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 7, 2025
This is a book that I wished I could share with some native New Orleanians that I know. One friend used to tell me that he knew the white members of the family. They never spoke to the Black members of the family at all.
Not being from New Orleans, I found the interweaving of names and families confusing at first. It was surprising that while many of these family stories began on a plantation with rape, by the third generation we were presented with consensual unions and marriages between black and white citizens. Many of them rushed to get legal marriages and baptismals after the Civil War—before Jim Crow brought it all to an end.
It’s also surprising how long the state maintained a list of suspected Black names so that race could be entered on a birth certificate. That said, I do recall a woman who sued the state when she was issued an id because she had been classified as Black under Louisiana’s one drop rule. She lost the case.
Not being from New Orleans, I found the interweaving of names and families confusing at first. It was surprising that while many of these family stories began on a plantation with rape, by the third generation we were presented with consensual unions and marriages between black and white citizens. Many of them rushed to get legal marriages and baptismals after the Civil War—before Jim Crow brought it all to an end.
It’s also surprising how long the state maintained a list of suspected Black names so that race could be entered on a birth certificate. That said, I do recall a woman who sued the state when she was issued an id because she had been classified as Black under Louisiana’s one drop rule. She lost the case.
Displaying 1 of 1 review