Moving to a new race

Migration, by definition, involves people leaving the communities in which they and their families are known for new communities in which they and their families are unknown, very likely. It is a move in which, if one has the physical appearance to pull it off, one can leave one's racial identity behind. During the 1920s, the peak years of the Great Migration, it is estimated that ten to thirty thousand blacks she'd their black identities each year in precisely this way, passing into a sea of whiteness as they migrated north. 

 Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010), pp. 64-65