Session V: Race
Read it As with gender (and, to a lesser extent, with class), the category of race has been
Definition. This is fully social
construct
controversy of racism
Problems of intersectionality
crucial to politicizing American studies and making it pay close attention to the
social effects (and background) of all kinds of texts. As an analytic category, race sounds
strange and problematic in a German cultural context, and it does so for valid his-
torical reasons. At the same time, German culture’s shyness to talk or think about
race keeps holding back contemporary debates about racism.
The term has a different tradition in the US and in an American academic con-
text, though, and we accordingly use it (though often in single quotation marks
to underscore that it is a problematic category) in the field. Race in this sense
must be seen not as a biological category but as an entirely artificial cultural con-
struct that nevertheless has a very concrete impact on people’s lives. Beginning
with African American studies, an attention to race has first and foremost led to
a better understanding both of how arbitrary and questionable the category of
race is and how fundamentally it still structures contemporary societies. It has
led to a clearer understanding of how racism works, even in cases where there
is only a veiled notion of race in place, as, for example, in the context of oriental-
ism.1 More recently, attention has turned from looking only at Blackness (or other
’marked’ identities) to asking how whiteness, the ’unmarked’ identity, is also cul-
turally constructed. Simultaneously, the field of postcolonial criticism has pro-
vided a number of productive terms to study questions of race in (post)colonial
contexts.
After the election of Barack Obama, some observers claimed that US culture
had entered a condition of ’post-racialism,’2 in which race did not matter any-
more. Recent developments have contradicted this idea. Among these develop-
ments are the problem of police brutality against Black citizens (as highlighted by
#blacklivesmatter and the controversy around taking a knee during the national
anthem) and the racism that informs certain politics (such as the ”wall”) favored
by Donald Trump and his supporters.
Looking Back at Race/Class/Gender
This session also concludes the first section of the LC-I seminar. It would be in-
complete if it did not point out that these three categories of difference—race,
class, and gender—are only three examples. There are more categories, dis/ability,
age, religion, and many more, that one could talk about. More importantly, the
most interesting things happen, analytically, at those places where these cate-
gories of difference overlap. This kind of intersectionality was first discussed in
the context of race and gender, when Black feminists pointed out that their social
and cultural position was not adequately addressed by either feminism (which
tended to focus on ’the experience of women’—as if all women were alike) nor
by race studies (which tended to talk about Blackness as if all Black people were
alike).
1
Tyson explains what is meant by Orientalism in postcolonial theory. ⇒ Cf. page 7
2
Note that there were similar claims regarding gender: the idea that feminism had achieved its
goals and that we had entered a time of ’post-feminism.’ In both cases, claims of ’post-racialism’
and ’post-feminism’ ultimately served to keep racism and patriarchy in power by denying their
existence. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1146#52136
1
 Reading:
1. Haney López. ”The Social Construction of Race”

2. Tyson. ”Postcolonial Criticism”

3. Boesenberg. ”Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies”

4. Morrison. Excerpts from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination
Primary Texts:
1. Alice Walker, ”Everyday Use”
Further Reading:
1. ”Rac(e)ing for Happiness? Blackness, Whiteness, and Success in The Pursuit
of Happyness” (Sample Essay on The Pursuit of Happyness) 3

2. Ernest Hemingway, ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”4

You can find reading questions on this week’s texts here.

The Confounding Problem of Race

Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding
problem of race is that few people seem to know what race is. In this essay, I de-
fine a “race” as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically con-
tingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. I argue Definition
that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which con-
tested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features,
faces, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our
faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an on-
going, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces
of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions. As used
here, the referents of terms like Black and White are social groups, not genetically
distinct branches of humankind.
Note that Whites exist as a race under this definition. It is not only people
of color who find their identities mediated by race, or who are implicated in the
building and maintenance of racial constructs. White identity is just as much
a racial fabrication, and Whites are equally, or even more highly, implicated in
preserving the racially constructed status quo. I therefore explicitly encourage
Whites to critically attend to racial constructs. Whites belong among those most
deeply dedicated to fathoming the intricacies of race.
In this context, let me situate the theory I advance in terms of the epistemological
significance of my own race and biography. I write as a Latino. The arguments I
present no doubt reflect the less pronounced role physical features and ancestry
3
A sample essay looking at the movie from the perspective of ’race.’ Cf. http://www.shrimpp.
de/srx/34488#52135
4
Hemingway’s short story can be read as an example of exhibiting what Morrison calls an
”Africanist presence” within a narrative that is seemingly only interested in white Americans. If
you read the story, think about how you could analyze it from the perspective of critical white-
ness studies (see Boesenberg’s text). Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/88157#126309

2

As a gender
Race is a construct. No scientific
proof (genes)
Another proof of social construct
play for my community as opposed to Blacks, the group most often considered in
the elaboration of racial theories. Perhaps more importantly, I write from a per-
spective influenced by a unique biography. My older brother, Garth, and I are
the only children of a fourth-generation Irish father, Terrence Eugene Haney, and
a Salvadoran immigrant mother, Maria Daisy Lopez de Haney. Sharing a simi-
lar morphology, Garth and I both have light but not white skin, dark brown hair,
and dark brown eyes. We were raised in Hawaii, far from either my father’s roots
in Spokane, Washington, or my mother’s family in San Salvador, El Salvador. In-
terestingly, Garth and I conceive of ourselves in different racial terms. For the
most part, he considers his race transparent, something of a non-issue in the way
Whites do, and he relates most easily with the Anglo side of the family. I, on the
other hand, consider myself Latino and am in greatest contact with my mater-
nal family. Perhaps presciently, my parents gave Garth my paternal grandfather’s
name, Mark, for a middle name, thus christening him Garth Mark Haney. They
gave me my maternal father’s name, Fidencio. Affiliating with the Latino side of
the family, in my first year of graduate school I followed Latino custom by ap-
pending my mother’s family name to my own, rendering my name Ian Fidencio
Haney Lopez. No doubt influencing the theories of race I outline and subscribe
to, in my experience race reveals itself as plastic, inconstant, and to some extent
volitional.
Biological Race
There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non-Blacks;
similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-
Whites. One’s race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for ex-
ample, sickle-cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene
frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled
by various scientists demonstrate, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group
differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation ex-
ists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these
populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fun-
damental genetic differences.
Rather, the notion that humankind can be divided along White, Black, and
Yellow lines reveals the social rather than the scientific origin of race. The idea
that there exist three races, and that these races are “Caucasoid,” “Negroid,” and
“Mongoloid,” is rooted in the European imagination of the Middle Ages, which
encompassed only Europe, Africa, and the Near East. This view found its clear-
est modem expression in Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of
Races, published in France in 1853-55. The peoples of the American continents,
the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania—living outside
the imagination of Europe and Count Gobineau—are excluded from the three
major races for social and political reasons, not for scientific ones. Nevertheless,
the history of science has long been the history of failed efforts to justify these
social beliefs. Along the way, various minds tried to fashion practical human ty-
pologies along the following physical axes: skin color, hair texture, facial angle,
jaw size, cranial capacity, brain mass, frontal lobe mass, brain surface fissures and
convolutions, and even body lice. As one scholar notes, “[t]he nineteenth cen-
tury was a period of exhaustive and—as it turned out—futile search for criteria
to define and describe race differences.”
3
 To appreciate the difficulties of constructing races solely by reference to physical
characteristics, consider the attempt to define race by skin color. On the basis of
white skin, for example, one can define a race that includes most of the peoples of
Western Europe. However, this grouping is threatened by the subtle gradations
of skin color as one moves south or east, and becomes untenable when the fair-
skinned peoples of Northern China and Japan are considered. In 1922, in Ozawa
v. United States, the Supreme Court nicely explained this point. When Japanese-
bom Takao Ozawa applied for citizenship he asserted, as required by the Natu-
ralization Act, that he was a “white person.” Counsel for Ozawa pointedly argued
that to reject Ozawa’s petition for naturalization would be “to exclude a Japanese
who is ‘white’ in color.” This argument did not persuade the Court: “Manifestly,
the test [of race] afforded by the mere color of the skin of each individual is im-
practicable as that differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among
Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the
swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons
of the brown or yellow races.” In rejecting Ozawa’s petition for citizenship, the
Court recognized that racial boundaries do not in fact follow skin color. If they
did, some now secure in their White status would have to be excluded, and oth-
ers firmly characterized as non-Whites would need to be included. As the Ozawa
Court correctly tells us, “mere color of the skin does not provide a means to racially
divide people. Precedent. Ideology slightly starts
to fail...
The rejection of race in science is now almost complete. In the end, we should
embrace historian Barbara Fields’s succinct conclusion with respect to the plausibility
of biological races: “Anyone who continues to believe in race as a physical at-
tribute of individuals, despite the now commonplace disclaimers of biologists
and geneticists, might as well also believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and
the tooth fairy are real, and that the earth stands still while the sun moves.”

Postcolonial Criticism
Perhaps one of the most important abilities critical theory develops in us is the
ability to see connections where we didn’t know they existed: for example, con-
nections between our personal psychological conflicts and the way we interpret
a poem, between the ideologies we’ve internalized and the literary works we find
aesthetically pleasing, between a nation’s political climate and what its intellec-
tuals consider “great” literature, and so forth. Most of the critical theories we’ve
studied so far have encouraged us to make connections along one or more of
these lines. Postcolonial criticism is particularly effective at helping us see con-
nections among all the domains of our experience – the psychological, ideologi-
cal, social, political, intellectual, and aesthetic – in ways that show us just how in-
separable these categories are in our lived experience of ourselves and our world.
Indeed, that’s why postcolonial criticism asks us to think of ourselves and others
in terms of what it calls cultural difference: the ways in which race, class, sex, gen-
der, sexual orientation, religion, cultural beliefs, and customs combine to form
individual identity. In addition, postcolonial theory offers us a framework for ex-
amining the similarities among all critical theories that deal with human oppres-
sion, such as Marxism; feminism; gay, lesbian, and queer theories; and African
American theory.
In fact, because postcolonial criticism defines formerly colonized peoples as
any population that has been subjected to the political and economic domina-

4
Def colonialism tion of another population, you may see postcolonial critics draw examples from
the literary works of African Americans as well as from, for example, the literature
of Aboriginal Australians or the formerly colonized population of India. However,
the tendency of postcolonial criticism to focus on global issues, on comparisons
and contrasts among various peoples, means that it is up to the individual mem-
bers of specific populations to develop their own body of criticism on the his-
tory, traditions, and interpretation of their own literature. Of course, this is pre-
cisely what African American critics have been doing for some time, long before
postcolonial criticism emerged as a powerful force in literary studies in the early
1990s.

Postcolonial Criticism and Literary Studies

Although postcolonial criticism didn’t become a major force in literary studies un-
til the early 1990s, the cultural analysis of colonialism on which it draws has played
an important role in anticolonial political movements everywhere and took its
place as a field of intellectual inquiry when colonial regimes began to topple af-
ter World War II. As a domain within literary studies, postcolonial criticism is both
a subject matter and a theoretical framework. As a subject matter, postcolonial
criticism analyzes literature produced by cultures that developed in response to
colonial domination, from the first point of colonial contact to the present. (You
may recall reading postcolonial literature under the heading of “Commonwealth
literature,” which it was called until the 1980s.) Some of this literature was written
by the colonizers. Much more of it was written, and is being written, by colonized
and formerly colonized peoples. As a subject matter, any analysis of a postcolo-
nial literary work, regardless of the theoretical framework used, might be called
postcolonial criticism. For English majors, of course, postcolonial criticism focuses
on the literature of cultures that developed in response to British colonial domi-
nation because English departments study, for the most part, literatures written
in English.
However, as a theoretical framework, and this is our primary concern here,
postcolonial criticism seeks to understand the operations – politically, socially,
culturally, and psychologically – of colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies. For
example, a good deal of postcolonial criticism analyzes the ideological forces
that, on the one hand, pressed the colonized to internalize the colonizers’ values
and, on the other hand, promoted the resistance of colonized peoples against
their oppressors, a resistance that is as old as colonialism itself. And as we’ll see,
because colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies can be present in any literary
text, a work doesn’t have to be categorized as postcolonial for us to be able to
use postcolonial criticism to analyze it.

Postcolonial Identity and ’Othering’

Given that a good deal of postcolonial criticism addresses the problem of cultural
identity as it is represented in postcolonial literature, let’s take a closer look at the
issue of postcolonial identity. In order to do so, however, we must first under-
stand colonialist ideology, the various reactions to which, in large part, consti-
tute the origins of postcolonial identity for individual human beings as well as
for communities. As we begin to use the following concepts, however, we must

5
remember that we are applying generalizations to groups of people that differ
greatly in terms of their history and experience before, during, and after colo-
nial rule. Thus, such postcolonial terms as unhomeliness and mimicry , which
we’ll discuss shortly, are only “a helpful shorthand, because they do not allow
for the differences between distinct kinds of colonial situations, or the workings
of class, gender, [geographical] location, race, caste or ideology among people
whose lives have been restructured by colonial rule (Loomba 19). intersection

Colonialist ideology , often referred to as colonialist discourse to mark its

relationship to the language in which colonialist thinking was expressed, was
based on the colonizers assumption of their own superiority, which they con-
trasted with the alleged inferiority of native (indigenous) peoples, the original
inhabitants of the lands they invaded. The colonizers believed that only their own Basis of superiority

Anglo-European culture was civilized, sophisticated, or, as postcolonial critics put

it, metropolitan .Therefore, native peoples were defined as savage, backward, Name to emphasize superiority

and undeveloped. Because their technology was more highly advanced, the col-
onizers believed that their whole culture was more highly advanced, and they
ignored or swept aside the religions, customs, and codes of behavior of the peo-
ples they subjugated. So the colonizers saw themselves at the center of the world;
the colonized were at the margins. The colonizers saw themselves as the embod-
iment of what a human being should be, the proper “self”; native peoples were
considered “other,” different, and therefore inferior to the point of being less than
fully human.
This practice of judging all who are different as less than fully human is called
othering, and it divides the world between “us” (the “civilized”) and “them” (the
“others,” the “savages”). When Europeans first arrived in the “New World,” for ex-
ample, land that wasn’t occupied by Christians was considered “empty land and,
therefore, theirs for the taking. In other words, native inhabitants of these lands
were so othered by the colonizers that they didn’t officially exist. Native inhabi-
tants were certainly physically present indeed, European conquerors often used
them as slaves, and European missionaries arrived to Christianize them but as
non- Christian “savages,they didn’t count. The “savage was usually considered evil
(the demonic other) as well as inferior. But sometimes the “savage was perceived
as possessing a “primitive beauty or nobility born of a closeness to nature (the
exotic other ). In either case, however, the “savage remained other and, therefore,
not fully human. Otherity and it difference. So, this
concept of other seems very
interesting. The full fail of
opressive ideology (class, gender)
will be when will be no ”other”,
Eurocentrism even if other is just exotic other

Today, this attitude – the use of European culture as the standard to which all
other cultures are negatively contrasted – is called Eurocentrism. A common ex-
ample of Eurocentrism in literary studies is the longstanding philosophy of so-
called universalism. British, European, and, later, American cultural standard-
bearers judged all literature in terms of its “universality”: to be considered a great
work, a literary text had to have “universal” characters and themes. However,
whether or not a text’s characters and themes were considered “universal” de-
pended on whether or not they resembled those from European literature. Thus,
the assumption was that European ideas, ideals, and experience were universal,
that is, the standard for all humankind. Europeans are humans which
have culture and reason, other do
not
6

Yes, I remember that
I did not know that...
I agree, it exists. But ”other”
people also had not very god
image of European people - as
unspiritual, evil and so on. Maybe
we just all afraid on something
unusual
An example of Eurocentric language can be seen in the term I used earlier –
New World – to denote the very old worlds of the Americas, a land which was
“new” only to the Europeans. Similar examples of Eurocentric language can be
seen in the terms First World , Second World , Third World , and Fourth World to
refer to, respectively, (1) Britain, Europe, and the United States; (2) the white popu-
lations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa (and, for some the-
orists, the former Soviet bloc); (3) the technologically developing nations, such as
India and those of Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia; and (4)
the indigenous populations on every continent who were subjugated by white
settlers and are marginalized today by the majority culture that surrounds them,
such as Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians (and, for some theorists,
nonindigenous populations who have the status of racial minorities in First World
countries, such as African Americans). Although these four “worlds are commonly
referred to today, and we’ll use these terms in this chapter, we should remain
aware of their Eurocentric implications. Such language makes sense only if his-
tory begins with Europe and is organized in terms of European colonial conquest.
It ignores the existence of earlier worlds – such as those of Greece, Egypt, Africa,
the Middle East, China, and the Americas – and it privileges European military
conquest as the primary means of organizing world history.
Orientalism
Orientalism is an example of Eurocentric othering, analyzed by Edward Said (pro-
nounced sah-eed), which has been practiced in Europe, Britain, and America. Its
purpose is to produce a positive national self-definition for Western nations by
contrast with Eastern nations on which the West projects all the negative char-
acteristics it doesn’t want to believe exist among its own people. Thus the Chi-
nese or the Arabs, or whatever Asian or Middle Eastern population is politically
convenient, are defined as cruel, sneaky, evil, cunning, dishonest, given to sex-
ual promiscuity and perversion, and the like. (Think of the cruel, deceitful Arab
merchant in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, who is saved from
prison by the young DeLacey, a European, whom the Arab subsequently betrays.)
Citizens of the West then define themselves, in contrast to the imaginary “orien-
tal” they’ve created, as kind, straightforward, good, upright, honest, and moral. In
short, the “oriental is an invention of the West, by contrast to whom it has been
able to define itself positively and justify any acts of military or economic aggres-
sion it has found advantageous.
Mimicry
Colonialist ideology, which is inherently Eurocentric, was a pervasive force in the
British schools established in the colonies to inculcate British culture and values
in the indigenous peoples and thereby forestall rebellion. It’s difficult to rebel
against a system or a people one has been programmed, over several genera-
tions, to consider superior. The plan was extremely successful and resulted in the
creation of colonial subjects, colonized persons who did not resist colonial subju-
gation because they were taught to believe in British superiority and, therefore,
in their own inferiority. Many of these individuals tried to imitate their colonizers,
as much as possible, in dress, speech, behavior, and lifestyle. Postcolonial critics
7
refer to this phenomenon as mimicry , and it reflects both the desire of colo-
nized individuals to be accepted by the colonizing culture and the shame expe-
rienced by colonized individuals concerning their own culture, which they were
programmed to see as inferior. Postcolonial theorists often describe the colonial India is a good example

subject as having a double consciousness or double vision, in other words, a con-

sciousness or a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two antago-
nistic cultures: that of the colonizer and that of the indigenous community.

Double Consciousness
Double consciousness often produced an unstable sense of self, which was height-
ened by the forced migration colonialism frequently caused, for example, from Definition

the rural farm or village to the city in search of employment. (Forced migration,
either as a quest for employment, including indentured servitude, or as the re-
sult of enslavement, scattered large numbers of peoples around the globe, and
large populations of their descendants have remained in the diaspora, or sepa-
rated from their original homeland.) This feeling of being caught between cul-
tures, of belonging to neither rather than to both, of finding oneself arrested in a
psychological limbo that results not merely from some individual psychological
disorder but from the trauma of the cultural displacement within which one lives,
is referred to by Homi Bhabha and others as unhomeliness. Being “unhomed is
not the same as being homeless. To be unhomed is to feel not at home even in
your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity
crisis has made you a psychological refugee, so to speak. Can be like that. But! Is it universal
definition and theory? A lot of
Double consciousness and unhomeliness persist in decolonized nations to- people preserve their culture in
any circumstances
day. Among the tasks formerly colonized peoples face is the rejection of colonial-
ist ideology, which defined them as inferior, and the reclamation of their precolo-
nial past. Both tasks involve many complex problems of interest to postcolonial
critics. For example, in order to reject colonialist ideology and embrace their pre-
colonial cultures, some native authors, such as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o,
write in their own local languages. When they do so, however, they face the dif-
ficulty of surviving in a publishing industry, both in their own countries and in-
ternationally, that requires the use of English. The use of native languages often
requires native writers to put forth the double effort of writing in their indigenous
languages and then translating their work into English or having it translated.

Postcolonial Criticism & Hybridity

Many indigenous writers from former British colonies prefer to write in English be-
cause that is the language in which they first learned to write. As Nigerian writer
Chinua Achebe observes, “[F]or me there is no other choice. I have been given
the language and I intend to use it” (Morning Yet on Creation Day 62). Some also
argue that English provides a common language for the various indigenous peo-
ples within Third and Fourth World nations, who speak a number of different local
languages, to communicate with one another. And they point out that English, as
a world language, facilitates the emergence of those nations into global politics
and economics.
Another problem that complicates the desire to reclaim a precolonial past is
that it is not always easy to discover that past. As we noted earlier, much pre-

8

So, because of that it is very
important not to destroy
something valueble in struggle
with postcolonial ideology
Economic reasons of slavery
colonial culture has been lost over many generations of colonial domination. In
addition, many postcolonial theorists argue that, even had there been no colo-
nization, the ancient culture would have changed by now: no culture stands still,
frozen in time. Furthermore, most cultures are changed by cross-cultural contact,
often through military invasion. For example, ancient Celtic culture was changed
by the Roman legions who occupied the British Isles. And Anglo-Saxon culture
was changed by the many generations of French rule that followed the Norman
conquest of that same territory in the eleventh century. By the same token, the
precolonial cultures of colonized peoples influenced European culture. For exam-
ple, Picasso’s art was greatly influenced by his study of African masks. Therefore,
many postcolonial theorists argue that postcolonial identity is necessarily a dy-
namic, constantly evolving hybrid of native and colonial cultures. Moreover, they
assert that this hybridity , or syncretism as it’s sometimes called, does not consist
of a stalemate between two warring cultures but is rather a productive, exciting,
positive force in a shrinking world that is itself becoming more and more cultur-
ally hybrid. This view encourages ex-colonials to embrace the multiple and often
conflicting aspects of the blended culture that is theirs and that is an indelible
fact of history.
Critical Race Theory
“Race” is not a quality of an individual or of social groups–it is not a biological fea-
ture people “have.” Instead,“race” refers to a position assigned to people through
a process called racialization. It is the dominant group–white middle-and upper-
class people–that racializes or “others” social groups with less power. Since “race”/ethnicity
is not the only system that establishes hierarchies in Western societies, the pro-
cess of racialization differs depending on factors such as gender, sexuality, class,
dis/ability, religion, age, etc. The experience of racism isdifferent for a working-
class Black lesbian and a straight upper-middle-class Black cis-man, for example
[...]. For a full understanding of “race,” one thus needs an intersectional approach
developed by scholars of color such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, or Patri-
cia Hill Collins.
With regard to North American culture, it is important to remember that both
the United States and Canada arose as “settler colonies”: Europeans and Euro-
pean Americans deprived Native Americans and First Nations of their land, claim-
ing North America by settling there. Settler colonialism involved the construction
of racial hierarchies legitimizing this conquest, which included particular con-
structions of sexuality (Morgensen). Likewise, slavery represented a central in-
stitution in the British North American colonies and later the United States until
1865 (Painter; Berlin). Contemporary concepts of “race served to justify the en-
slavement of Native Americans and African Americans, defining them as inferior
to whites.
Yet, African Americans and Native Americans are not the only ethnic groups
targeted by racism in North America. What Edward Said has termed “Oriental-
ism,” a colonial discourse that lumps all cultures East of Europe together as “the
Orient” and contrasts them unfavorably to a supposedly enlightened, modern,
and democratic “West,” led to the large-scale persecution of Asian Americans in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II perhaps being
9
the most egregious examples (Pfaelzer). Until the mid-twentieth century, Jew-
ish Americans were also classified as “Orientals,” suffering from pervasive Anti-
semitism (Brodkin; Dijkstra 348–91). The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, attacked both
African Americans and Jewish Americans. Groups such as Chicanos/as and more
generally Latinos/as as well as Muslims also suffer from racism–a form not neces-
sarily based on notions of biology, but on an understanding of culture as some-
thing essential and unchanging. This is called “cultural racism. It is not quite
Важной характеристикой
clear... Does itтак
mean
называемого
that Europeans«нового
and American
расизма»,
Because “race” remains pervasive in Western societies, it continues to affect «культурного
opressed evenрасизма»
another ”white”
или
«дифференциального
people because of diiff culture?
расизма»
knowledge production both in the university and elsewhere. In order to change является эссенциализация
this, scholars in Critical Race Theory seek to analyze the ways in which racial hier- этничности и религии и
заключает людей в ловушку
archies resonate in academic research. Pioneers in this field have been academics якобы неизменных
of color such as W.E.B. Du Bois. In the late twentieth and the first decades of the референтных категорий, как
будто они неспособны
twenty-first century, researchers such as Lorde, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, Pa- приспособиться к новой
tricia Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, José Esteban реальности или изменить свою
идентичность. Таким способом
Muñoz, Gayatri Spivak, Richard M. Juang, Roderick Ferguson, and many others культурный расизм изображает
have illuminated the workings of “race” and its interrelations with other cate- «другую культуру» в качестве
угрозы, которая может
gories by drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches. Some of them, most загрязнить доминирующую
influentially perhaps Paul Gilroy, have called for the abolition of “race” as a con- культуру и нарушить её
внутреннюю структуру. Такой
cept altogether. взгляд основан на явной идее,
что одни группы являются
истинными носителями
национальной культуры и
Critical Whiteness Studies исключительными
историческими преемниками,
тогда как другие —
потенциальными
Whereas texts by writers of color tend to address “race” in a self-reflexive man- разрушителями её «чистоты»[32
ner, this is not usually the case for works by white authors. Why? Because power
operates, among other things, by passing itself off as “normal” to those who ben-
efit from it–white people in terms of “race,” heterosexuals where sexuality is con-
cerned, upper- and middle-class people in class hierarchies, etc. Thus many white
writers are not aware of their own racial position, even though it is logical that, if
a society is structured by “race,” there can be no “raceless” position.
Others may be unwilling to recognize their own whiteness and reflect criti-
cally on it. Realizing that one’s own perspective and one’s experience are very
specific instead of “universal” or “just human” already signals a loss of power:
One can no longer confidently generalize from such a vantage point. Further,
whiteness is associated with a history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide–not
a legacy anyone wants to inherit. Even today, whiteness means that one enjoys
opportunities not open to everybody. Although white people might not ask for
white privilege, as George Yancy points out, holding that position means being
complicit in the exploitation of others–especially if one does not seek to under-
stand how racism works and attempts to change one’sbehavior accordingly. One
can reproduce racism without intending to, even despite one’s best intentions.
This is actually the primary way in which racism operates today.
The scholarly field that tries to clarify these mechanisms is called Critical White-
ness Studies. It is a branch of Critical Race Theory that looks specifically at the
dominant or hegemonic racial position. Again, many of the leading scholars in What is it?

this area are academics of color, Cheryl Harris, Steve Martinot, Yancy, and Mor-
rison among them. Since the 1980s, white researchers such as David Roediger,
Ruth Frankenberg, Richard Dyer, and Robin DiAngelo have also contributed im-
portant studies. I will draw on their insights to discuss whiteness in F. Scott Fitzger-
ald’s most well-known novel.

10
 Whiteness in The Great Gatsby (1926)
Whiteness is first of all noticeable in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book’s color symbolism. It
stands for wealth, elegance, and status–whether in “the white palaces of fashion-
able East Egg” (11), the dresses of upper-class women (14), or Daisy’s “little white
roadster” (81). In fact, Daisy, the name of the central female character who is so
ardently desired by Gatsby, itself evokes a color combination of white and yellow,
or gold. (She is also called “the king’s daughter, the golden girl” 126 [...]) When
the narrator Nick Carraway goes into Manhattan with Gatsby,
the city ris[es] up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all
built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the
Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first
wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. (74–75)
The fact that this is an imaginary city–historical New York is clearly constructed
from “olfactory” resources, money that smells–does not diminish the brilliance
and sweetness of this vision. But sweetness, that is sugar, was also central to
British colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean, and the language employed here
(“seen for the first time”) recalls the rhetoric of European conquest, revealing this
image to be a white fantasy.
The representation of Tom and Daisy Buchanan shows how (upper-class het-
erosexual) whiteness is gendered: Desirable women are complemented by domi-
nant men (some of whom, like Tom, explicitly advocate white supremacy, see 19).
Despite his scorn for Tom, Nick does not exactly question white privilege either–
he “laughs aloud at the absurdity of three fashionably dressed African Americans
in a limousine who seem to think they can compete with him and Gatsby (see 75).
I didn’t notice that As Morrison has argued in Playing in the Dark, one distinctive feature of white
US-American literature is its marginalization of what she calls an “Africanist pres-
ence.” Here, one can see how the Black characters primarily serve to show the so-
cial superiority of the white narrator–even though, in economic terms, they are
obviously much more prosperous than he is.
Nick is also marked as white by his ambivalent relationship to Jay Gatsby (160),
whose claim to whiteness seems much less secure than his own. Even though he
admires Gatsby’s drive and his capacity for self-invention, Nick despises his taste.
From the narrator’s Old Money perspective, Gatsby’s excessive consumption–his
flashy house, his gaudy car–identifies him as nouveau riche. The questionable
source of his money and his business partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jew-
ish American portrayed in a extremely racist manner (75–78), also compromises
Gatsby’s whiteness. When it is finally revealed that his original name was James
Gatz (106), the question arises whether Gatsby himself is Jewish and thus, in the
!!! logic of the 1920s “scientific racism, not quite white.
This does not mean that whiteness is necessarily morally superior in The Great
Gatsby. Tom and Daisy are among the most corrupt figures in the novel. But Nick’s
eventual return to the Midwest, which is figured as a train ride through a winter
landscape (182–83), reimagines the “real snow, our snow” (182) as a blank page
on which he and the likes of him can “write” whatever they want–never mind
that their “identification with this country” (182–83) is based on forcing Native
Americans off their land in the context of settler colonialism.
In a similar rhetorical move, the ending of the text repeats a problematic col-
lective American ideal by referring to “Dutch sailors”’ first sight of the “fresh, green

11
breast of the new world” (187), evoking the Eurocentric and sexist image of North
America as “virgin land.” Altogether, then, Fitzgerald’s novel mythologizes white-
ness (as well as hegemonic masculinity) instead of questioning it. Its criticism
of the American Dream, limited as it is in its focus on the discrimination of the
newly rich by Old Money families, thus risks reproducing most of the hierarchies
that place this dream out of reach for a large majority of the US population. I agree

Black Matters
These chapters put forth an argument for extending the study of American litera-
ture into what I hope will be a wider landscape. I want to draw a map, so to speak,
of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, in-
tellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New
World—without the mandate for conquest. I intend to outline an attractive, fruit-
ful, and provocative critical project, unencumbered by dreams of subversion or
rallying gestures at fortress walls.
I would like it to be clear at the outset that I do not bring to these matters
solely or even principally the tools of a literary critic. As a reader (before becom-
ing a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves
rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust
in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the
danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writ-
ers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are
wrenched with pity; the way Dostoevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and
Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie,
Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—each of us can ex-
tend the list.
I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering
what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fic-
tion, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the
writer’s imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an
African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized
world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads
me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically
racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking
at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work,
becoming.
My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know
about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects
of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all
sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers
always know, at some level, that they do this.
For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of
a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians
and critics and circulated as “knowledge.” This knowledge holds that traditional,
canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-
hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the
United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the
Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place
or consequence in the origin and development of that culture’s literature. More-

12
 over, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature
emanate from a particular “Americanness” that is separate from and unaccount-
able to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among
literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of
white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without
relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in
the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded ev-
ery American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most
furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature. The contemplation
of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature
and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.
These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and champi-
oned characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social
engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problemat-
ics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of
death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist
Author argues that this main presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American litera-
characteristics of Americal
Literature directly connected to ture distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and
the precence of African ppl unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded
language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and
moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics
extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restric-
tion. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions,
heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the
signs and bodies of this presence—one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist
She argues
I want
that
to see
”Blackness”
an examples
is an presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.
important part of American
literature, even literature of white
men.

Black Matters (Pt. 2)

My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and
carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I
call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite,
Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States,
and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term
“Africanism” not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philoso-
pher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term “Africanism,” nor to suggest the va-
rieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have in-
habited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative
blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range
of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric
learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its
uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the
Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about
and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations
and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through
the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette,
American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase,
to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless.
It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a

13
mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.

The United States, of course, is not unique in the construction of Africanism.

South America, England, France, Germany, Spain—the cultures of all these coun-
tries have participated in and contributed to some aspect of an “invented Africa.”
None has been able to persuade itself for long that criteria and knowledge could
emerge outside the categories of domination. Among Europeans and the Euro-
peanized, this shared process of exclusion—of assigning designation and value—
has led to the popular and academic notion that racism is a “natural,” if irritating,
phenomenon. The literature of almost all these countries, however, is now sub-
ject to sustained critiques of its racialized discourse. The United States is a curious
exception, even though it stands out as being the oldest democracy in which
a black population accompanied (if one can use that word) and in many cases
preceded the white settlers. Here in that nexus, with its particular formulations,
and in the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans
and African-Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic ratio-
nales for subjugation, an American brand of Africanism emerged: strongly urged,
thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. For ex-
cellent reasons of state—because European sources of cultural hegemony were
dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country—the process of organizing
American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode
of a new cultural hegemony.

These remarks should not be interpreted as simply an effort to move the gaze
of African-American studies to a different site. I do not want to alter one hierar-
chy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those
totalizing approaches to African-American scholarship which have no drive other
than the exchange of dominations—dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced
by dominant Afrocentric scholarship. More interesting is what makes intellectual
domination possible; how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest Can we separate knowledge and
ideology?
to revelation and choice; what ignites and informs the literary imagination, and
what forces help establish the parameters of criticism. This is very interesting. Can we
separate km

Above all I am interested in how agendas in criticism have disguised them-

selves and, in so doing, impoverished the literature it studies. Criticism as a form
of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and ex-
plicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work
writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within
a human landscape. It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought
to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strate-
gies undertaken to erase its presence from view.

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagina-
tion is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a
close look at literary “blackness,” the nature—even the cause—of literary “white-
ness.” What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of white-
ness play in the construction of what is loosely described as “American”? If such
an inquiry ever comes to maturity, it may provide access to a deeper reading of
American literature—a reading not completely available now, not least, I suspect,
because of the studied indifference of most literary criticism to these matters.

14
Alice Walker: ”Everyday Use”
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday
afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not
just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean
as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves,
anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes
that never come inside the house.
Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in
corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying
her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always
in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is
confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from
backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child
came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and
child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes the mother and fa-
ther weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how
she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together
on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered
into a bright room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty
man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have.
Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She
pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks
orchids are tacky flowers.
In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands.
In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can
kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather.
I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork
liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog.
One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a
sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course
all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to
be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair
glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with
my quick and witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson
with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in
the eye? It seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight,
with my head fumed in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She
would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.
How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body
enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she’s there, almost hidden
by the door.
“Come out into the yard,” I say.
Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless
person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough
to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin

15
on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other
house to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. She’s a woman
now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago was it that the other house burned?
Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms
sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery
flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in
them. And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig
gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray
board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don’t you do
a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that
much.
I used to think she hated Maggie too. But that was before we raised money,
the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us with-
out pity; forcing words, lies, other folks habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting
trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of make-
believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know.
Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away, like dimwits, at
just the moment we seemed about to understand. Dee gain ”white” qualities

Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation
from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old
suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in her
efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the
temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what
style was.

I never had an education myself. After second grade the school was closed
down. Don’t ask my why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now.
Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see
well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes
her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and She (Mother) is an example how
Whiteness ideology works: she
then I’ll be free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I admire knowledge but afraid of it;
never was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a man’s she is so in patriarchial
stereotypes talking to her
job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in ’49. Cows are soothing daughter
and slow and don’t bother you, unless you try to milk them the wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the
one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs anymore.
There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a
ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the
outside. This house is in a pasture too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee
sees it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where
we “choose to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her
friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me, “Mama, when did
Dee ever have any friends? Dee is ahsamed of her parents.
They are poor and black to her
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after
school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the
well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles
in lye. She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but

16
 turned all her fault-finding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from
a family of ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.

When she comes I will meet … but there they are!

Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay
her with my hand. “Come back here, ” I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well
in the sand with her toe.
It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse
of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet were always neat looking, as if
God himself had shaped them with a certain style. From the other side of the car
comes a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from
his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what
it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your
foot on the road. “Uhnnnh.”
Controversially, Dee is trying to be Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud
”black” now, get back to roots
it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light
of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Ear-
rings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and mak-
ing noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her
armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Mag-
gie go “Uhnnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on
a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope
about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears.
“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the dress makes
her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is all grinning and he
follows up with “Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie
but she falls back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there
and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.
“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of a push. You can
see me trying to move a second or two before I make it. She turns, showing white
heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a
Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and snaps off picture after picture of me sitting
there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes
a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling
around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then
she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses me on
the forehead.
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie’s hand. Mag-
gie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat, and she
keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but
wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands. Anyhow,
he soon gives up on Maggie.
“Well,” I say. “Dee.”
Wow! Changing the nameWow!
and “No, Mama, she says. “Not ‘Dee, Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo! “What hap-
identitý
pened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.
She is trying to understand who is “She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after
she
the people who oppress me.”
“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,” I said. Dicie is
my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born.
“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.

17
 “I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.
“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.
“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far
back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back
beyond the Civil War through the branches.
“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”
“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.
“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our family, so why should
I try to trace it that far back?”
He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting
a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero sent eye signals over my
head.
“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.
“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said Wangero.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call you, we’ll call
you.”
“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.
“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”
Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name twice
as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three times he told
me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I
didn’t really think he was, so I didn’t ask.
“You must belong to those beef cattle peoples down the road,” I said. They
said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but they didn’t shake hands. Al-
ways too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters,
throwing down hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd, the men
stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see
the sight.
Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and rais-
ing cattle is not my style. They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero Whiteness again

(Dee) had really gone and married him.

We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards and pork
was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins and corn bread, the
greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes.
Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy
made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.
“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I never knew how
lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints,” she said, running her
hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand
closed over Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was
something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped up from the table and
went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now. She
looked at the churn and looked at it.
“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy whittle it out of
a tree you all used to have?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”
“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.

18

She has a strange approach to all
the family stuff - like for an exotic
art objects, but totally alien, not
belonged to her past
“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so low you almost
couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but they called him Stash.”
“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing. “I can use the
churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,” she said, sliding a plate over the
churn, “and I’ll think of something artistic to do with the dasher.”
When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a
moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to see where hands
pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the
wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and
fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree
that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and started
rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came
Wangero with two quilts. They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big
Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted
them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Moun-
tain. In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and
more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s paisley shirts. And one teeny
faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa
Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War.
“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old quilts?”
I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door
slammed.
“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These old things was
just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma pieced before she
died.”
“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders
by machine.”
“That’ll make them last better,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of dresses Grandma
used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts
securely in her arms, stroking them.
“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother
handed down to her,” I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved
back just enough so that I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.
“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.
“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she
marries John Thomas.”
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d probably be backward
enough to put them to everyday use.”
“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for long enough
with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t want to bring up how I had offered
Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they
were old-fashioned, out of style.
“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper.
“Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than
that!”
“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how to quilt.”
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 Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not understand. The haha. She thinks that she is only
who understand something
point is these quilts, these quilts!”
“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”
“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her
feet made as they scraped over each other.
“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to never winning
anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I can ‘member Grandma Dee with-
out the quilts. Maggie thought it was about
memory, but it wasn’t like that
I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff about Dee. Dee has total
and gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big approach of white person who
love to play with cute black stuff
Dee who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands
hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear
but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew
God to work.
When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and
ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in church and the spirit of
God touches me and I get happy and shout. I did something I never done before:
hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts
out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Maggie just
sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.
But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.
“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.
“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.
“Your heritage,” she said, And then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said,
“You ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie. It’s really a new day
for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it. Yes, their lives are to black? to be
black
She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and
chin.
Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we
watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then
the two of us sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go
to bed.

Reading and Study Questions (Session V)

The following questions are meant to help you with your independent study. Use
them to get a sense of what you have understood and what you have not under-
stood from this session’s readings. They are not graded and they only serve your
self-assessment. However, do take them seriously. It is one thing to think ”oh,
I know this” and to put it down in writing. To prepare for in-class discussion in
Session V, make sure you can
1. answer all questions
2. ground your answers in the reading
3. ask follow-up questions
Your answers will be private (i.e. visible only to you), but all users can see how
many users have answered a particular question.

20
 Reading Questions:
1. In what ways can ’race’ be understood as simultaneously fabricated and
In a way that people with different real?
skin colour and culture really
exist. Some people on our planet
from diff parts of it are very diff in 2. What are examples of ’Othering’ in (post)colonial contexts? Where else do
size, body, color, hair etc. This is
about bilogical, real. About false - we encounter processes of Othering in US culture, beyond (post)colonial
thisOthering
difference meansdoesdividing
not mean pplthat
by contexts?
us andisothers.
there In times or
any superiority of
colonisation
inferioritythere wereshould
or they invaders, be
ppl of high culture treated and savages,
differently. 3. How can we describe the construction of identities (or subjectivities) in colo-
others, local ppl. They were
treated not like Europeans. nial contexts? Try to answer this question by referring to your understand-
The identity of human in ing of the terms ’mimicry,’ ’double consciousness,’ and ’hybridity.’
countries which were invaded was
controversial and complicated. To
stay alive and sane, local ppl tried 4. What is ‘whiteness’? How does it work? In how far can a discussion of ‘white-
to be likemeans
Whiteness invaders, to talk of
a position likea
that, dress likeoften
them, haveseen
the ness help to understand ‘race and racism?
priviledge, that is not
same
by it’svalues.
author.This Onehellped them to
can reproduce
survivewithout
racism (for example the tradition
intending to, even 5. Boesenberg argues that race is created by processes of racialization. Can
to straight
despite one’s blackintentions.
best hair). AnotherThis
racialization
quality is an artificial
of their identities political
is double you think of an example for how someone is racialized?
act of isconnecting
actually thesomeone
primary way
to in
any
consciousness
which racism- this is abouttoday.
operates have
race, made by group of
splitted personality - from one people of
government.
side they are a littleFor bitexample,
in a new 6. What does Morrison mean when she speaks of an “Africanist presence in
famous
culture, butpainting
halfly inwhere asian
their past andor
black American literature? Can you find examples for this presence from literary
try to ppl
saveportraited
in. Alice’sas a slaves
Walker or
story
She/HeNow
servants. means that
it can isbedespite
creating
about of
that texts or other cultural artifacts (films, TV shows,...)?
special school general meaning black
or communities for
community
black/white and presence
immigrants of
oppressed group of black ppl
formed and shaped the american
literature as it is now. Nowadays
example is American cinema,
shows, music (hip hop culture)
which is even dominant now

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