This paper aims to place Gertrude Stein's modernist work ”Melanctha” in dialogue with Nella Larsen's Passing to recognize cultural exchange between mainstream modernist and African-American expressive traditions. Stein's and Larsen's respective formulations of race, class and ethnicity in their passing narratives interrogate the nominal gesture towards the oneness of black Americans. While the existence of Melanctha torn between two worlds reveals the artificiality and oppressive of the color line, Clare's traversing the color line presents her biracial identity as one ramification of Black or American identity. As Melanctha and Clare refuse to have their identities collapsed into a monolithic black racial identity, their life stories thus share a tragic undertone: the mixed-race character must suffer from the cultural norm of monoracial imperative. Their tragic effacement critiques the principle of racial purity and interrogates the denial of legitimacy to mixed-race and biracial individuals.