If the plot of Brit Bennet’s, “The Vanishing Half,” were to be boiled down to its most raw form, one of the biggest facets of it would be the complex privilege of passing as white. Stella Vignes decides at a young age to live her life as a white woman, while her sister Desiree, chooses not to.

In the article, “Passing and the Costs and Benefits of Appropriating Blackness,” Williams Darity Jr. outlines a theory of passing that general society isn’t entirely familiar with. Often, when discussing passing into races, that concept is understood as a means of acquiring certain higher societal