Race and class

Inspired by posts by Tony, Shantel, et al, I thought I’d write something about the relation between race and class in the books and films we’ve watched over the course of the semester.

Overall, I’ve noticed that race has been less and less of a limit for successful blacks. That is, in books and films set in earlier times, it was impossible for any black to attain a high status in society, while later on it became more possible for blacks to “make it” in society. For instance, in Pudd’nhead Wilson, there are literally no successful blacks at all. All of the ones portrayed in the book (with the exception of Tom, who passed) were either slaves or steamboat workers. Likewise, in The House Behind the Cedars, set soon after the Civil War, there is a sharp divide between the wealth that blacks and whites were capable of attaining. Of course, there are many poor whites as well as poor blacks, but the upper limit of what members of the two races have is sharply defined. Even to become a lawyer requires passing. By contrast, in Passing, Brian and Irene are able to live a fairly comfortable middle class life in Harlem. Their family is not as wealthy as Bellew’s, of course, but Brian, although visibly black, is a doctor and apparently well-to-do enough that traveling to Brazil is not a financial impossibility. And, finally, by the time we get to The Black Notebooks, we have Bruce Derricotte working as vice president of a bank. Or Whiteboyz, where Khalid’s family is considerably wealthier than any of the boys’.

Still, even though race is evidently less of a barrier for highly intelligent black individuals, it is not the case that race is by the end disaggregated from class. Even in recent works, there is a significant relation between race and class/lifestyle. The Black Notebooks, for instance, describes the social gap between blacks and whites. She describes segregationist clubs that only admit white members, and segregationist housing policies where black house buyers are always brought to all-black neighborhoods and always taken away from predominantly white neighborhoods. In Twilight one of the Korean women interviewed says that she finds herself simply unable to connect with the black community: they simply live in a different world.

In addition to real economic and social differences between races, there are also imagined differences. Whiteboyz in particular illustrates the imagined and its role in constructing race. Flip and the others associate blackness with a particular kind of lifestyle: bikini-clad women, violence, rapping, illegally-obtained wealth. And it is this imagined life that becomes, for them, what blackness really is. The slippage between what is real and what is believed to be real is rapid: we never see Flip consider that there might be more to blackness than rapping with Snoop Dogg, even when one of his friends angrily asks him “have you ever been to Chicago?” or when he sees Khalid’s fine house. In some sense, the imagined becomes the real: Flip et al’s beliefs about race are reflected in their performance of black identity.

13.69

Hello!

Just a reminder that there are posts and article links relevant to your conversations over at the 13.69 blog. I only post there because it is too hard to post continually on four sites.

Check it out, particularly “all lesbians are sneaky,” (thanks Ms. Peck!) and also the newest one on”The Jim Crow Museum.”