This is a bizarre story, made difficult by the fact that we don’t have a language for this kind of white-to-black “passing.” Many Americans, and especially blacks, are familiar with black-to-white “passing,” whereby black Americans with European features present and identify as white. In A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, historian Allyson Hobbs describes men and women who left their black families to live in a white world.
