The central internal and external conflicts of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man relate to race. The narrator is pulled between his desires to live without constraints and to live within his cultural and racial heritage as a Black man. What is at stake is his life, as the narrator realizes each time he witnesses violence shaped by race. With each confrontation with race and racial violence, the narrator is forced to make a choice about his identity. He frequently takes the path of least resistance, and the novel, a fictionalized memoir, recounts his rationale for choosing to pass as white in the end.

The passing narrative is a genre that has existed as long as there have been negative consequences attached to functioning as a Black person in American society. Starting with the slave narratives, white-presenting Black people used passing to secure permanent or temporary freedom. One of the defining features of race in America is that being Black comes with constraints on one’s bodily autonomy, ability to move, and economic stability, making passing a strategy designed to bypass such restrictions. In Ellen and William Craft’s slave narrative Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), passing is a means to escape slavery, while passing becomes a way to evade racial and gender oppression in 20th-century works like Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and more contemporary works like Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020).