The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis’ upcoming book, more than ten years in the making, uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the country’s racial regime and learned to disregard them.
Harvard University Press | September 2024
The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Lewis examines the Caucasian War’s role in the nineteenth century in revealing the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
“... Sarah Lewis grows ‘The Unseen Truth’ from her superb Vision and Justice project into a work of stunning originality... Each chapter exposes the ‘racial detailing’ that has constructed a repressive racial regime that, once seen, can be undone.”
“... Sarah Lewis illuminates what it means to both ‘see’ and create race, deepening our ability to pursue justice.”
“In ‘The Unseen Truth,’ it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear... It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”