The Unseen Truth : When Race Changed Sight in America

Sarah Lewis unearths the critical moment when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. When popular nineteenth-century images of the Caucasus proved the lie of white supremacy, a new visual regime arose to suppress the evidence of the incoherence of racial order.

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions that shored up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The surprising catalyst was the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War. Images from the Caucasus captivated Americans but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising whatever did not serve the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what Americans were conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.