Allyson Hobbs does a convincing job of opening a window into the phenomenon of “passing,” when light-skinned African Americans successfully live as White. Her history begins in slavery, when those with white slave-holding fathers and enslaved mothers were most easily able to escape bondage. In Reconstruction Blacks very briefly had hope that their identity would not hold them back, hope that was dashed in the South by the backlash against Black office-holders. One of the most fascinating chapters looks at three writers of the Harlem Renaissance—Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes—and how they navigated their mixed race heritage. Ultimately, she argues, passing pits a network of heritage and social networks against one’s ambitions in a racist society; to pass, in most cases, is to be out of the history of one’s people. But hers is a sympathetic and non-judgmental history of a complex phenomenon.