"You Think Like You White": Questioning Race and Racial Community through the Lens of Middle-Class Desire(s)

Abstract

Consistently attended to by sociologists, political scientists and historians, US intra-racial class difference (and conflict) has perhaps enjoyed its most complex ongoing representation in literary realm, especially in fiction and criticism. These representations, from proverbial beginnings marked by Phillis Wheatley's poetry, to post-race era that is second millennium, refuse to cast subject as singular or stable and ever encourage readers to dispense with grand narratives of race. Paradoxically, an incredibly resilient conceptualization of a has proliferated within literature and oftentimes masks or completely negates an otherwise obvious heterogeneity. In this essay I examine three novels from 1980s in order to identify contradictory impulses that propel understandings of the race both towards and away from monolithic, often in same breath by same speaker. I contend that it is within context of post-civil rights 1980s-in which a stable black identity said to issue from a unified community is paradoxically both asserted and questioned-that a postmodem critique which defamiliarizes received identities emerges. I treat postmoder not exclusively as a period that chronologically follows modem, but also as a critical tension inherent in and its rational institutions, one that names instabilities within category of identity itself. In this sense, novels from 1980s revisit earlier historical periods in which modem identity was supposed to have been established. I understand postmodern in African American fiction to be critical reflexivity of contemporary literature to revision ways that has been constructed in historical past. Andrea Lee in Sarah Phillips (1984), Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), and Walter Mosley in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) use intra-racial class difference, especially middle-class aspirations, to refute romance of grand narratives of blackness. These three authors map quarrels within US identity politics across sparsely populated terrain of middle-class blackness and expose a set of contradictory truths including racialized community as a shelter from racism and violence; heterogeneity as incontrovertible evidence of evolution and equality; and class as an ultimately divisive and problematic difference. Generated in 1980s, these novels revisit earlier historical moments-Reconstruction, post-World War II, and Civil Rights era-in order to nuance these quarrels. All three novels offer us new insights into intertwined histories of racial uplift and individualism on one hand, and American identity on other. All three suggest that racial unity may have always been in tension with differences of social level, class, caste, and regional heterogeneity among blacks