ABSTRACT
Understanding and defining whiteness has its own unique challenges that, for a long time but particularly since the late 20th century, have been assumed by diverse researchers and thinkers in different latitudes of the Americas. Whiteness inhabits language, common sense, codes, signs, and symbols that we use to communicate and produce knowledge. Then, through the tools to endow the world with meaning, whiteness normalizes and its privileges become invisible. So, an anti-racist commitment to social transformation must therefore include changes in mental habits, language, and representations, along with changes in economic and political structures. The racial passing–posing as a race other than one's "own"–is another leitmotif of the literature written by racialized women in the Americas, with its earliest antecedent being the tale of Kate Chopin's The Father of Desiree's Baby. An early proposal on racial passing is the novel Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset, writer of the "Harlem renaissance".
