The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

Sarah Lewis’s book The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America examines America from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of Jim Crow when the country's conception of race, and whiteness, was transforming. A finalist for the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Lewis uncovers a pivotal era when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. Thanks to Professor Lewis’s historical detective work, what we see and what’s left unseen shapes everything we believe about ourselves and other people — and how we can start changing the narrative about who counts and who belongs in America.

Sarah Lewis is an award-winning art historian, founder of Vision & Justice, and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the author of the bestseller The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, as well as the forthcoming book Vision & Justice.

Join us at the City Club as author Sarah Lewis uncovers 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.

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Mac's Backs will be on site for book sales. City Club members receive a 20% discount.

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Online ticket sales for this forum will conclude on Wednesday, May 7th at noon. For more information regarding ticketing/registration, contact Stacy Roper at (216) 621-0082.

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The livestream will be available beginning at 12:00pm. Have questions? Send a text to 330.541.5794.

Production and distribution of City Club forums in partnership with Ideastream Public Media is generously provided by PNC and the United Black Fund.

The ideas expressed in City Club forums are those of the speakers, and not of the City Club, Ideastream Public Media, or their sponsors.