One of the major concerns of postcolonial literature in North Africa centers on how ethnic and racial identities are negotiated, performed and contested and how these processes are connected to the economy of political and social forces that have prevailed in the post-independence national state. In this regard, questions of racial and ethnic conflict generate subjectivities that are polarized in their allegiance between micro group ideology and the demand for intergroup solidarity/national identity. Laila Lalami’s Secret Son explores the struggle for self-definition and cultural belonging within a stratified society in which the wide gap between the elite (select wealthy Arab dominant) class and lower classes (including majority Arab and Berber populations) is complicated by ethnic and racial difference; from this, I argue, ‘reading’ the narrative relies on deep knowledge of the Moroccan social fabric and related politics of identity. In this paper I explore how the performance of ethnicity is constituted through the dynamic of rejection and social invisibility that some individuals, particularly Berbers, face in their assimilatory struggle and how ethnic ambiguity affects not only the emergence of cultural agency but generates forms of social resistance and political dissidence. In this regard, social construction of cultural hegemony is based on a dynamic of ethnic exclusionism and structures of racial or ethnic stereotyping. This paper highlights the notion of ethnic performance and how this connects to the development of tension between Islamist groups, national institutional indifference and the jaded transformation of former liberals into voices of the hegemonic power structures as reinforced by social stratification. I also explore the linguistic choice made by the author to write the work in English/address the work to an American reading audience.