The Vanishing Half is partly set in a mythical town in the Jim Crow South offering a critique of whiteness from the perspective of someone who passes for white by choice. This choice is motivated by a desire for financial stability, privilege, and safety. The book focuses on twins who are living on different sides of the color line. Bennett was interested in passing because of how it both exposes and strengthens the artifice of race. “On the one hand, if you can perform whiteness, then what does it mean to be white? If you can move between these categories because you decide that you will, what does it actually mean that we have systems that are built on reinforcing those categories?” she asks. “On the other hand, these characters who pass usually end up reinforcing the hierarchies that they are potentially destabilizing. The tension within passing stories is between this idea of destabilizing race and then reaffirming race at the same time.”
LP Bennett