The Invisible Line
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In the Obama era, as Americans confront the enduring significance of race and heritage, this multigenerational account of family secrets promises to spark debate across the country. Daniel J. Sharfstein's sweeping history moves from eighteenth-century South Carolina to twentieth-century Washington, D.C., unraveling the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America. Identifying first as people of color and later as whites, the families provide a lens through which to examine how people thought about and experienced race and how, for them and America, the very meanings of black and white changed. The Invisible Line cuts through centuries of myth to transform the way we see ourselves. - Publisher.
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I went a little rogue on this book and read each family's history as a unit, jumping past the other families' chapters, instead of reading it straight through in page number order. My reason for this was that by the middle of the first chapter of the Spencer story, which followed the first chapter for each of the other families, I was already a little muddled with names and stories. Skipping around the book in order to read each family's history straight through, then moving to the next family, and finishing with them all together in the epilogue, worked out just fine in terms of enjoyment, and much better in terms of following and remembering the stories.
The Wall and Spencer family stories were fascinating, and everything that I had hoped for when I picked up this book - enough said. The Gibson family story, however, I found very disappointing. Things started off very strong with Gideon Gibson and his “journey from black to white”, as it is often called in this book. It was fascinating and thought-provoking, and I wish it had stopped there. Unfortunately it continued on to Gideon Gibson's descendants, focusing primarily on Randall Lee Gibson and Hart Gibson. By this generation (Civil War era) the Gibsons are white, in that they think of themselves as totally white and everyone around them does too. Their whiteness is only questioned once, and it is treated by the Gibsons and everyone else as an absurd notion, one that is so preposterous that they barely respond. This means that readers are reading many chapters of what are essentially mini biographies of white racist Southerners - not what I signed up for. And while it's true that readers are well aware of the irony of the situation, that this racist, anti-black family would have been considered black by its own rules of "purity", Randall Lee and Hart and their children and grandchildren did not know it. The irony is lost on them, so why oh why was the vast majority of the Gibson story about them? Better to have addressed their generations in just one chapter and then moved into the generations that discovered that their family had passed from black to white.
