In The Intuitionist, I thought about a number of themes/issues: race, working women, corrupt politics, and the idea of passing—in which black people conceal their racial background. Since I first read about passing in an early American literature course, I made the assumption that in the last thirty or forty years (time frame of The Intuitionist?) covering up potentially damaging details of identity didn’t have to happen; for example, women writing and performing on the stage guised as men, and likewise, black Americans posing as whites in order to work in certain professions. While the idea that trying to be something that you’re not will only bring you trouble is a cliché of our times, and Whitehead hits us over the head with this several times in the novel. Lila Mae confronts the possibility that she, too, is trying to be someone else (wearing the shoulder-padded, male suit) when she also faces a generation gap in her meeting with Mrs. Rogers. Later, Lila Mae runs into both a generation gap and the problem of overcoming race when she realizes that Pompey got by at the Elevator Guild by avoidance. He says, “What I done, I done because I had no other choice. This is a white man’s world . . . I was the first colored elevator inspector in history. In history! And, you will never ever know what hell they put me through.” Fulton, she discovers, hated himself for lying and yet, did he have any other choice if he wanted to work as a theorist? Perhaps Bell Hooks, in Postmodern Blackness, is getting at something like this when he talks about his attendance at a primarily white, academic party and he discussed postmodernism with another black man, which he considered a show for the white academics. Hooks talks about language used in postmodernism: “I find myself on the outside of the discourse, looking in.” Hooks’ point could be well received by someone like Lila Mae and Fulton. But, whether it’s postmodernism, academia, or most other areas, I think there is something to be said that there are codes that all folks are asked/forced to follow if they want to get in. And, like Pompey, many will do what they have to do to get by—to survive. Maybe a good number of us are passing . . .