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. ( )

Excellent use of detail and personality in discussing an often-abstract topic. Sometimes the sheer amount of information made it difficult to follow the various family story lines. ( )

This outstanding history of the concept of race in America focuses on the overlooked mass migration from black to white as many African Americans gave up their identities in return for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As blacks, they suffered restrictions on the ability to earn a living, get an education, enjoy public facilities, avoid threats and insults, and live without the fear of lynching when the mood of whites spoiled. As Sharfstein points out, even years after the Civil War ended, "Countless thousands of Negroes in the South lived in conditions approximating slavery, shackled by sharecropping contracts, arrested on trumped-up charges, and sold as convict labor. Every few days a Negro was lynched: burned, shot, castrated, hacked to pieces."

Thus, crossing the invisible line between races became more and more attractive for “racially ambiguous” people, of whom there were many. Some even chose poverty as whites over affluence as blacks to escape the poisonous consequences of racism.

This journey from black to white forced Americans to come to grips with what the meaning of race, and how much of a “melting pot” they wanted their country to be (in contrast to populist rhetoric). Ironically, in the South, white communities often let individual blacks “pass” as long as they lived and acted as whites. After all, “to insist on a stricter rule would have been dangerous to the social order, as it would have risked reclassifying an unsettling number of people.”

In order to illustrate the experience of African Americans crossing the color line, Sharfstein follows three families over two centuries. He selected these three, he writes, “because they were typical, but also extraordinary.” And in the course of documenting their experiences, he offers a close-up look at seminal events in American history from the perspective of how they affected racial classification and what it meant for the millions of Americans outside the strict classification of black or white. As Sharfstein argues, “From the colonial era well into the twentieth century, the idea of race – the notion that blood transmitted moral character and social fitness – provided a central reason why American democracy exalted some people at the enduring expense of others.” It’s a radically different and fascinating way to approach American history.

As Sharfstein emphasizes, from the very beginning of our nation, “…the consequences of being black or white were enormous. It often meant the difference between slavery and freedom, poverty and prosperity, persecution and power.”

Once the importation of slaves was forbidden, the South needed to ensure that the children of slaves remained slaves in order to have a steady supply of new slaves, in spite of the fact that many of them had white slaveholding fathers. And of course, the creation of an inferior “Other” helped to eliminate class tensions among whites.

After the Civil War, the need for sharper boundaries between black and white increased. Sharfstein postulates, "Before the war slavery had established and supported white privilege. As long as law and violent custom preserved the boundary between master and chattel, privileged whites had had little read need to insist on racial purity; allowing ambiguous people to become white only strengthened the prevailing order. [He observes that many of those in the middle claimed a Cherokee or Portuguese grandmother.] In slavery’s absence, however, preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant, aggressive action to enforce them.”

One of the most effective methods of fostering resistance to civil rights for newly freed slaves was to express racism through the vocabulary of sexual deviancy. Thus orators railed about the “degeneracy of black women and the “depravity” of black men justifying laws separating the races. Later, at end of the 19th Century, “scientific” reports on the races “established” that blacks were “innately stupid, lascivious, violent, and diseased.” The language used created the political reality, in spite of the fact that the “reality” suggested that it was actually the white men who couldn’t keep away from the black women.

Lawmakers had a number of incentives to legislate the definition of whiteness, because it not only designated race, but status and privilege as well. [As legal scholar Robert Cover famously pointed out, a legal tradition is part of a normative world that establishes paradigms for behavior. Because the Constitution is such a powerful symbol for most Americans, its pronouncements have enormous impact. In the Dred Scott case (60 U.S. 393, 1857), the Supreme Court declared that all people of African ancestry, whether slave or free, were not citizens of the United States. State-imposed racial segregation was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S. 537, 1896). These decisions transformed the myth of white purity and the value of white privilege into “objective facts.” Thus do “legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others." (Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 97 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 1983 and “Violence and the Word,” 95 Yale L. J. 1601, 1986)].

Legislatures and courts began to delineate “drop by drop” how much blood made a person white or black. (Of course, a drop of white blood didn’t translate into whiteness, but a drop of black blood equaled blackness, clearly demonstrating that the goal of such legislation was to solidify a social order. Moreover, as Cheryl I. Harris points out, “The acceptance of the fiction that the racial ancestry could be determined with the degree of precision called for by the relevant standards or definitions rested on false assumptions that racial categories of prior ancestors had been accurately reported, that those reporting in the past shared the definitions currently in use, and that racial purity actually existed in the United States.” Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 106 Harv. L. R. 1707, 1740, 1993)

And in fact, this is part of Sharfstein’s whole point: many white Americans are not as racially “pure” as they might think they are. Whiteness is more of an ideological construct than a reality.

And yet, as Sharfstein notes, “The harder whites made it for blacks to earn a living, educate their children, and just make it through a single day without threat or insult, the greater the incentives grew for light-skinned blacks to leave their communities and establish themselves as white.”

The color line has always functioned, Sharstein avers, “in terms of racism, not race; hierarchy as opposed to heredity; barriers instead of blood.”

Evaluation: In spite of the meticulous research and theoretical underpinnings of this book, it is eminently readable: free of academic obscurantism without sacrificing its critical authority. For those of you who prefer to pick up history from the human angle in the form of stories about memorable characters, this book is perfect: the saga of the three families selected, The Gibsons, The Spencers, and The Walls, turned out to be absolutely absorbing. In clear and compelling prose, this book tells a story that should not be missed. ( )

I have always been fascinated with ambiguity, especially where race and gender are concerned. So much of what we understand to be writ in stone is barely writ at all. The passage across perceived lines of race and gender is difficult or simple depending on when and where you live and how affluent or poor you are. It is in the interstices of these constructs that a greater understanding of either side of the line can be seen more clearly.

In The Invisible Line Mr. Sharfstein traces the histories of three families and their different journeys across the color line(and sometimes back again). He amply demonstrates the flexibility inherent in early American social systems and the solidification of race constructs after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Along the way he tells a wonderful story and he tells it well. Writing with precision and literary verve, he lays out the stories of these families and through them we are able to see and contextualize our complex history and the ways we've learned to live with each other.

Mr. Sharfstein's fascinating and readable history reminds us that in many ways we are who we say are and much of who we can get away with saying we are is filtered through class and community. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in well-written social history of all kinds. ( )

Extensively researched and well-documented, this scholarly history examines a recognized but often over-looked phenomenon in American history and racial relations: crossing the color line. As the subtitle, Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White, suggests, the book uses as case studies three different families who crossed the color line at three different times in history and at three different Southern places. The end result for each of the families was quite different socio-economically with one family gaining significantly in power, while one descended sharply, and a third continued along at about the same subsistence level in which they had been living.

Told in a chronological fashion, the stories of the Gibson's, Wall's, and Spencer's personal family histories are woven through with the history, politics, and law of the times to create a picture of just how each family's racial designation changed over time. The narration is a curious mix of detached historical fact and a deliberate and immediate omniscient narration style more commonly found in fiction. The bulk of the story centers around the decades immediately preceding and then subsequent to the Civil War when the concept of race was established more firmly in legal terms than at any time prior or since. And while the story is of the families as wholes, the focus is rather tighter on certain family members who left more historical record. Sharfstein chooses to keep his historical narration chronological which means that chapters on each family alternate throughout the book. This was sometimes slightly confusing and difficult to follow, especially in the beginning before the major figures became quite as distinct and recognizable as they eventually did. Once the central figure in each family was better established, it was easier to follow the switches but then they became a bit distracting as just when the reader settles into one family's narrative, the chapter break appeared to follow a different family's narrative.

Despite the structural difficulties, there is much interesting information contained here. I had always assumed from classes and previous mentions in books that the color line was fairly rigid and that "passing" was a difficult and fraught endeavor. While it was certainly fraught given the laws on the books about what percentage of blood, even the infamous "one drop," determined race, the line was never as uniformly rigid as many history books make it out to be. In fact, it turns out that the color line was actually rather porous. And that rather than being a furtive, quick event, crossing the line could, in some cases, be more of a gradual drift that not only did no one question but in which entire communities were complicit.

I found the book to be a rather dense read when it delved into racial legalities and political situations but strangely descriptively fictional feeling when discussing the lives of these very real people. There are several instances of repetition of the historical facts made all the more obvious by their similar wording within the different family's chapters. In spite of the structural flaws and dichotomous narrative technique, there was much good, very detailed information to be found here. This book could easily be required reading for a college history class focused on race in the South, being generally more readable than many traditional history books. It is certainly an interesting entry toward a more complete understanding of race and the US, shining a light on a fascinating phenomenon that was for so long only whispered of, if even that. ( )