Edited sentence: Examine this phenomenon in two sub-topics: first, the factual reality of Black-to-White passing; second, the literary rhetoric of Black-to-White passing.If asked, most Americans today would say that they would consider it unlikely or even impossible ("genetically impossible," some would say) for a Black mother to have a White child.If pressed, some might admit that several generations of out-marriage to Whites might produce a child that superficially looks White, but that this would be an exceedingly rare occurrence.Many studies have demonstrated that those few genes are so ephemeral that they can vanish in just two or three generations, producing physically European-looking individuals even from biracial parents.No other country has anything like it.Only a dozen or so genes encode for the handful of physical traits that Americans consider "racially" important (skin tone, hair curliness, nose width, and the like).The mismatch between U.The most widely accepted explanation is that at some time in the past, Americans became so committed to the notion of "racial" purity implied by the U.To a physical anthropologist such beliefs are nonsensical.endogamous color line that they turned their backs on the facts in favor of their odd fantasy.popular culture and genetic reality is of interest to anthropologists and historians because it demands explanation