After her father died, Lawton began to unravel the truth about her parentage, and the racial identity that she had been denied. She fled from England and the turmoil of her home life to live in Black communities around the globe and to explore her identity and what it meant to live in and navigate the world as a Black woman. She spoke with psychologists, sociologists, experts in genetic testing, and other individuals whose experiences of racial identity have been fraught or questioned in the hopes of understanding how, exactly, we identify ourselves.