Crossing the LineAs W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth century U. S. racial order. Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial passing, a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode races authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to