Audrey Wu Clark on Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024) is a magisterial and updated contribution to whiteness studies, championed by well-known figures in the 1990s such as Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993). In this book, Lewis unearths a historical comparison between the US Civil War (1861-1865) and the Caucasian War (1817-1864) in which Russia attempted to and indeed successfully colonized the geographical area between the Black and Caspian Seas, which included parts of now Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Lewis argues that Confederate popular discourse similarly perceived the Civil War as a war of northern aggression. At the time, observers drew parallels (that have since been lost) between the Civil War and the Caucasian War: Lewis writes, “The leader of the Caucasian War resistance, Imam Shamil, was even referred to as the region’s Jefferson Davis.”[1] The Russian poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin was likewise perceived as the Russian Frederick Douglass freedom fighter.[2] In drawing the historical comparison between the Civil War, which marked the second founding of the US nation, and the Caucasian War, which did the same for Russia, Lewis makes the important claim that along with the invented technology of daguerreotype photography in the 1840s and 1850s, the visual image became the metric with which to expose and reinter fictions about race after the Civil War.

Lewis presents a range of compelling visual evidence and analysis to support this argument. Images of Circassians, the indigenous group of the northern Caucasus region, demonstrate that idealized female Circassian beauties usually possessed African phenotypical features such as broader noses, sometimes darker skin, and “afro-approximating style” hair.[3] The first chapter, entitled “Ungrounding: The Caucasian War and the Second Founding of the United States” explores President Woodrow Wilson’s request of Major General James G. Harbord to have women from Caucasus presented to him and inspected as the “purest” of the Caucasian race in order to “justify racial hierarchies and domination.”[4] On the other hand, P. T. Barnum, the “Greatest Showman of the Century” showcased “a Circassian Beauty” as an “extraordinary living FEMALE SPECIMEN OF A NEW RACE from a remote corner of Circassia.”[5] Together with Barnum, photographer Charles Eisenmann decentered the white, racial purity of Caucasians at the time of their loss of homeland. This truth proceeded to be buried by figures such as Wilson who reinvented the Caucasian as the pillar of white supremacy. In chapter two, “Racial Adjudication: Frederick Douglass and the Circassian Beauties,” Lewis goes back in time to discuss how Douglass placed his hopes for racial progress in the technologies of the photographs wherein people could self-determinedly image themselves in the ways they wanted to be perceived. Likewise perpetuating the relativity of race, in his preface to Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, James McCune Smith writes, “‘the term ‘Caucasian’ is dropped by recent writers on Ethnology; for the people about Mount Caucasus, are, and have ever been, Mongols. The great ‘white race’ now seek paternity . . . in Arabia . . . Keep on, gentlemen; you will find yourselves in Africa, by-and-by.’”[6] Lewis continues her exploration of visual culture as “common knowledge” constructions of race in chapter three: “Unsilencing the Past: The Production of Race, Culture, and History” in which she explores visual art by figures such as Frank Duveneck’s A Circassian, which features a mixed-race man whose hair, like previous images of Circassian women featured “afro-approximating style” hair. Lewis strikingly continues her discussion of racial approximation during the Jim Crow era in her fourth chapter, “Negative Assembly: Mapping Racial Regimes and the Cartography of Liberation” in which she details her archival work in world maps in the Map Collection reading room at the New York Public Library wherein she noticed that starting in the 1890s, the Caucasus region started to be excised from world maps and atlases.[7] She writes, “It would have been common, year after year, to read in a popular geography textbook or an atlas, ‘By far the largest and most civilized of the four divisions of mankind is the white or Caucasian race,’ and that its ‘leaders now dominate the world,’ and then, in later versions, to see the comment, ‘Their original home is not known.’”[8] It is from this point onward that Caucasian becomes a discursive myth for racial hierarchy rather than a denotation for a racially destabilizing region in the world. It is in this chapter, too, that Lewis globalizes the Jim Crow era by contextualizing the “Boer War, at a time when Jim Crow segregation was beginning to inform the creation of the South African system of apartheid.”[9] Her fifth chapter, “The Unseen Dream: Racial Detailing and the Legacy of Federal Segregation in the United States,” returns to the Wilson administration, rejoining chapter one, to focus on the Black civil servant Swan Marshall Kendrick. Kendrick worked in a Jim Crow federal government, specifically the War Department, and for the NAACP office but dispiritedly left government service to become a dairy farmer in New Jersey in 1921 and died from a fatal infection from livestock just two years later. Although this chapter is a valuable addition to the book, it seems to slightly stray from the topic of visual culture on which the other chapters center. She describes Kendrick’s labor as pointillist, but otherwise the relation between his story and visual culture is unclear.

In the same vein, the only slight weakness of the text lies in some of the tangents it follows. For example, it’s not entirely clear how the well-known facts of Du Bois’s biographical information on the death and burial of his child Burghardt and Morrison’s inspiration by Margaret Garner’s story to write Beloved fit with Lewis’s main claims. The structure of the book—starting with Wilson, going back in history to Douglass, and returning to Wilson—is somewhat surprising but it gives the text a sense of closure. Moreover, she writes persuasively in accessible, non-jargony academic prose that easily weaves in theoretical and critical texts. Moreover, she engages and deepens Toni Morrison’s signification of silence in American history in Playing in the Dark as she excavates hidden truths—the mixed-race heritage—and histories of domination surrounding Caucasians;[10] such truths, as points out were exposed only to be reinterred by powerful figures like Woodrow Wilson.

Lewis’s main contribution to whiteness studies is to elevate sight and visual culture in “common knowledge” notions of race during the Jim Crow era after ethnological and phrenological models of race during the nineteenth century had been dispensed with. She poignantly concludes the book:

What has been traced in this book is as untold history that many have refused to see, and some thought unworthy of seeing. The story of race in American can only be told while being attuned to the precise consideration of information that falls off the edges of our vision. It requires attention to the nuance, to the shard, to representations, as much as to recasting the history of racial formation we think we know. By not paying attention to what has been silenced, and left out of sight, we have created a racial regime of adjudication that is so devastating that it is perhaps only possible to see, to withstand, to take in one fragment assembly at a time.[11]

Racial formation, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have held since 1986, is constantly being created, inhabited, and destroyed, throughout history. Lewis points out that visuality has always been instrumental in that construction even if we have disavowed it.

[1] Sarah Lewis, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024), 4.

[2]Lewis, 82.

[3] Lewis, 19.

[4] Lewis, 18, 19.

[5] Lewis, 19.

[6] Lewis, 65.

[7] Lewis, 139.

[8] Lewis, 139.

[9] Lewis, 158.

[10] Lewis, 7, 112.

[11] Lewis, 263.