The antebellum money supply was notoriously confusing, geographically variable, and entirely unstandardized, leading to routine problems in money’s use and exchange. During these same decades, despite proslavery advocates’ efforts to define racial identity unambiguously, the concept of race was also unstable and fluid. This chapter embeds the confusion over money’s identifying qualities within the disquiet over establishing racial identity that concurrently surfaced in the figure of the so-called white slave – extremely fair-skinned enslaved persons. I focus primarily on William Wells Brown’s literary output, especially his 1853 novel Clotel, along with court cases in which fair-skinned enslaved persons claiming a white identity sued for their freedom. Beyond highlighting shared tropes and metaphors, this literary and legal archive demonstrates that commentators used the language of money to shape how people comprehended racial identity and, equally, how the language of race impacted the concept of money itself. In the recurring slippage between what counted as real and what counted as fake in notions of money and of race, Brown and others seized upon money’s own inconsistencies to undermine slavery’s usual equation of Blackness with only monetary value.