The Vanishing Half Study Guide

Brit Bennett was born in Oceanside, California, where she spent the next 17 years of her life. Upon graduating from high school, she majored in English at Stanford University before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan. She also briefly studied at Oxford, making her the first person in her family to leave the country. In 2014, Bennett wrote an article for Jezebel called “I Don’t Know What To Do With Good White People.” The piece was published in response to the fact that police officer Darren Wilson—who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—was not indicted for his crime. “I Don’t Know What To Do With Good White People” attracted millions of readers in only several days, spreading Bennett’s name throughout the literary community and beyond. Two years later, when she was just 26, Bennett published her debut novel, The Mothers, earning her a place on the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list of breakout writers. Her second book, The Vanishing Half, was published in 2020 to wide acclaim.

The novel’s exploration of “passing” builds on the United States’ long history of racism and, more specifically, the many opportunities Black Americans were denied long after the end of slavery. It was very common during slavery for enslavers to rape and impregnate enslaved women. The offspring of such circumstances were born into slavery, even if they had light skin. Desiree and Stella’s great-great-great-grandfather in The Vanishing Half was born into this exact situation, which is why he later founded Mallard, a place devoted to light-skinned people whom society technically considered Black. Some Southern states in the early 20th century even had what was known as the “one-drop rule,” which stipulated that people with just one Black ancestor were automatically considered Black. Many light-skinned multiracial people therefore faced racism and discrimination, which is partially why Desiree and Stella’s great-great-great-grandfather wanted to specifically carve out a “third” place in society (of course, the other reason he founded Mallard was that he was colorist and didn’t want to associate with dark-skinned Black people). The existence of the “one-drop rule” is a clear sign that Southern society was intent on denying rights to anyone who wasn’t completely white, though it’s also the case that many multiracial people who looked white actually were able to “pass” and, in doing so, avoid the dangers and challenges posed by life in the United States during the Jim Crow era.

The Vanishing Half builds on a literary tradition of novels about racial “passing,” which is when a light-skinned Black person lives as a white person. The most prominent work in this genre is undoubtedly Nella Larsen’s Passing, which was published in 1929. Like The Vanishing Half, Larsen’s Passing focuses on two Black women who were close as children but then grew apart; one of them starts “passing” as white while the other continues to live as a Black woman, thus resembling Stella and Desiree’s respective trajectories. Another prominent novel about passing is James Weldon Johnson’s An Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which follows a Black man who witnesses terrible acts of racist violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, as a result of what he’s seen, decides to “pass” as white. More broadly, Brit Bennett’s writing has a lot in common with the work of Toni Morrison, who—like Bennett—explored what it means to be Black in the United States, doing so through stories about family, history, and generational trauma.