White Wife Research Articles

Combating Trauma Through a Family Approach in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

The novel Everything I Never Told You by contemporary Chinese-American author Celeste Ng portrays the challenges faced by a cross-cultural family consisting of James Lee, a Chinese-American university professor, and his white wife Marilyn, in 1970s America. She explores the intergenerational trauma caused by cultural conflicts. Centered around the death of their daughter Lydia, the novel delves into the intergenerational trauma experienced by the members of this cross-cultural family due to familial and societal conflicts. It also depicts how the family members rebuild trust, reconcile with each other, and heal from their trauma. Through this portrayal, the novel highlights the pressing need, amidst cultural clashes and social transformations, to embrace an inclusive and forward-looking perspective to embrace and adapt to the transformative changes.

The Making of Immigrant Identities in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker

This article analyzes the formation of multiple and hybird identities of an immigrant in Korean American writer Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995). Growing up between Korean ancestry and American surrounding, the second-generation immigrant Henry feels uncertainty and dilemma in his sense of belonging. He simultaneously travels in both cultural spaces in his quest of sense of belonging. At times, he attempts to identify himself with American cultural space along with his White wife. However, the reaction of the mainstream society to the immigrants of Asian origin like him makes him aware of his marginalized status in the US. In the same way, he cannot wholeheartedly identify with his Korean ancestry. His upbringing in the American cultural milieu problematizes his sense of belonging in the Korean cultural space. He negotiates between his origin and upbringing in the third space of the diaspora. This negotiation renders multiplicities and pluralities of self, which reflects in his evolving subjectivities that deconstruct the binary of home and host culture. This article examines the formation of hybrid and multiple subjectivities of Henry through his negotiations between his native and host cultural space. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the third space, including hybridity, multiplicities and immigrant identities, has been employed to substantiate evolving multiple subjectivities of immigrants.

Review: Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, by David J. Halperin

Review: <i>Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO</i>, by David J. Halperin

Debating and Extending “Covert Progression” and Dual Dynamics: Rejoinders to Scholars

Debating and Extending “Covert Progression” and Dual Dynamics: Rejoinders to Scholars

MASKULINITAS LAKI-LAKI KOREA AMERIKA SEBAGAI LIYAN DALAM NATIVE SPEAKER KARYA CHANG-RAE LEE

This article aims to reveal how the Korean-American male protagonist, describe as ‘Liyan’, is consumed by his white wife in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee’s (1996). This article argues that sexual acts committed against Henry Park by his white wife is manifested as a form of consumption towards ‘Liyan’. The theories use in this research are post-colonialism theory that is argued by Edward Said (2006) and consumption theory that is proposed by Bell Hooks (1992). This article uses descriptive analytical method. The data from the novel are described to obtain an overview of the construction of Korean-American masculinity. Later on the analysis it is found that in Native Speaker the stereotype construction towards Korean American man is not only puts Korean American man as inferior towards white masculinity, but also in the marriage relationship between Korean American man and white women

Cuckolds, cucks, and their transgressions

ABSTRACTCuckold porn, which typically depicts a white man ‘forced’ to watch his white wife have sex with a black man, has become a popular subgenre over the past decade. In 2014, masculinist and racist ‘cuck’ memes began to appear in online forums and soon entered mainstream political discourse. This article considers cuckold porn and cuck memes alongside historical cuckoldry performances, like the contented ‘wittol’, an Elizabethan antecedent of the ‘fuck my wife’ desires of the modern fetish. Cuckold porn is marked by a number of queer and formal transgressions, namely in its unique ability to transcend norms of identification and spectator theory while exaggerating sexual and racial difference. The capacity to subvert yet reinforce white masculinity was maintained in the transmission of the fetish through porn and is reflected in the memes it inspired. The article ends with a discussion of cuckold porn's role as a transceiver of specific and higher-order behavioural scripts.

The Black Messiah: Writing Equiano

In this essay, Nigerian author Chika Unigwe discusses the challenges involved in writing the biographical novel The Black Messiah (currently published only in Dutch translation as De zwarte messias), which imaginatively retraces the life of Olaudah Equiano. Unigwe’s first attempt to reimagine Equiano took the form of a children’s book in the late 1990s. This project immediately drew her attention to the two primary, antithetical difficulties of writing biographical fiction: on the one hand, one needs to rely on historical information to recreate the past accurately but, on the other, fiction — being art — cannot impart a great deal of such information without becoming too didactic. Unigwe abandoned this early project but eventually took it up again in the form of an adult novel. Some of her creative choices in writing this book were guided by the imaginative spaces left in Equiano’s autobiography — for example, he hardly mentions his white wife and remains vague about his time as a plantation overseer. This prompted a series of questions for Unigwe to explore: how did a black man experience an interracial marriage in the eighteenth century? How did Equiano handle “stubborn” slaves as an overseer? How could a twenty-first century writer recreate Equiano’s state of mind without judging him by contemporary standards? There were additional challenges too. One pertained to the type of language to be used to recount Equiano’s story, another to the constraints involved in writing about a real figure, many aspects of whose life and death are on the historical record. Ultimately, Unigwe tried to find a balance between fact and fiction, history and imagination, so as to highlight the magnitude of Equiano’s accomplishments, while also exploring him as a human being whose story remains particularly relevant today.

Miscegenation Aesthetics: Marriage, Maternity, and Modernism in the Life and Writing of Margery Latimer

Today, despite having published four well-regarded books of fiction in the late 1920s and early 1930s, modernist writer Margery Latimer is best known as the white wife of Jean Toomer, whose 1923 Cane has been considered a foundational text of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, her marriage to Toomer has been the touchstone for persistant debates over his racial identity, which has meant Latimer's distinctive contributions to both American literature and critical thought about the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and nation have been obscured. This essay engages debates over racial identity and the construction of American literary history by attending to Latimer as more than Toomer's wife. By excavating both her published and archived writing, it argues that her intimate and aesthetic practices were efforts to undo the white supremacist logics of anti-miscegenation and reconsiders the grounds upon which writers and their work have been remembered or forgotten.

Fertility Behavior of Interracial Couples

Despite the unprecedented rise in the number of intermarriages and multiracial individuals in recent decades, our understanding about the fertility behavior of interracial couples is limited. Using data from the 2002 and 2006–2015 National Survey of Family Growth, this study compares the risk of pregnancy and the pregnancy intentions of interracial couples with those of same‐race couples. Interracial couples' risk of pregnancy differed little from that of same‐race White couples, with the exception of White wife–Black husband couples, whose risk of pregnancy was higher than both same‐race White and Black couples. Neither socioeconomic disparities nor union characteristics explained their elevated pregnancy risk. Interracial couples' risk of unintended pregnancy mirrored closely that of same‐race couples from the husband's racial or ethnic group. Socioeconomic disparity was the primary driver of differences in pregnancy intentions between interracial and same‐race White couples.

Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf by Lane Demas

Reviewed by: Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golfby Lane Demas Kathleen McElroy Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf. By Lane Demas. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 363. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3422-7.) Lane Demas's exhaustive book Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golfreveals that a sport considered the epitome of whiteness played a significant role in shaping the black experience in the United States. Golf courses were not just physical spaces for black leisure and racial uplift—they were strolling battlegrounds in the African American freedom struggle. The competing interests often, in golf parlance, left an uneasy lie. "Like the dread and forbidden topic of intermarriage, the golf question makes everyone uncomfortable," remarked the white wife of Walter White, the fair-skinned NAACP leader (p. 206). National civil rights leaders ebbed and flowed in their support for integrating municipal golf courses, so local black men and women usually led the fight to access what Demas calls "the largest swath of white-only space," especially in southern cities (p. 181). African Americans who were passionate about golf—a pastime the black press eagerly promoted—built private courses, played on sometimes subpar black-only public courses, and competed on the United Golfers Association (UGA) tour, similar to the American Tennis Association for black tennis players. Demas recounts the exploits of male golfers thwarted by the Professional Golf Association's "Caucasian clause," which lasted until 1961 (p. 117). Demas, a history professor at Central Michigan University, obligatorily ends Game of Privilegewith a thoughtful discussion about Tiger Woods, race, money, and the superstar's lasting contribution to America. To Demas, that contribution certainly is not to American golf, where the black presence has shrunk since Woods's dominance at the turn of the twenty-first century. Instead, Demas concentrates on proving that African Americans made significant contributions to golf (such as dentist George Franklin Grant, who in 1899 [End Page 1053]patented the golf tee) and that integrating the sport was more than a middle-class folly. Doing so held the threat of jail, as was the case for six black golfers in Greensboro, North Carolina. Demas argues—somewhat convincingly—that the Supreme Court victories in Simkins v. City of Greensboro(1957) and Holmes v. City of Atlanta(1955) were as or more significant to integrating public spaces than Brown v. Board of Education(1954). Trying to upheave civil rights legacies he cannot budge, Demas also calls a seminal 1941 protest round of golf through a segregated Washington, D.C., public course more meaningful than Marian Anderson's 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial. More troubling is his correct but loose usage of the word "militancy" in describing both the actions of black activists who used legislative means to desegregate courses and those who murdered eight white people at a St. Croix golf club (pp. 201, 189). Ignore Demas's insistence that the first African American to compete in the fledgling U.S. Open, John Shippen in 1896, should be as remembered as Jackie Robinson. Instead, appreciate Demas's narratives about the ways Robinson and Joe Louis elevated golf's significance in America. Shortly before Robinson reintegrated Major League Baseball, the black press touted golf as more tolerant than baseball because of one big-money, integrated event. By 1952, Louis, who backed UGA tournaments, declared "'war on Jim Crow in golf '" (p. 120). After retiring in 1957, Robinson could not join any of the prestigious country clubs in the New York area, failed in business ventures to develop an integrated course, and declared golf the "'only sport in which a Negro does not have an equal chance today'" (p. 127). Demas's research, use of images, extensive footnotes, and historical tables make Game of Privilegeinvaluable for researching leisure, African American and southern history, and, of course, golf itself. As he hopes, Game of Privilegeindeed should start conversations—academic and, one hopes, during rounds of golf—about the ways Americans think about the sport's influence on race, and vice versa. Kathleen McElroy...

Race and Citizenship in Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal

A prominent concern of American novels before mid-twentieth century is especially evident in James Weldon Johnson's preface first edition of his The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: These pages also reveal unsuspected fact that prejudice against Negro is exerting pressure which, in New York and other large cities where opportunity is open, is actually and constantly forcing an unascertainable number of fair-complexioned colored people over into white (xxxiv). (1) Unless, that is, a social space is created in which African Americans can lead meaningful lives free from oppression, they will invade white world and in process collapse racial categories on which American culture relies. (Indeed, this concern accounts trope of contagion through sexual reproduction common in novels.) In this reading, Sinclair 1947 of passing, Kingsblood Royal, can be seen as obverse of earlier such novels. Rightly called Lewis's finest post-1920s novel (McLaughlin 7), it is story, written by a middleclass, Midwestern white man, of a middle-class, Midwestern white man named Neil Kingsblood who is at thirty-one a well-liked, respected citizen, a wounded veteran of World War II, headed vice-presidency of a local bank. Doing some genealogical research his father, however, he accidentally discovers that he is one-thirty-second part black. This family secret eventually comes out and, because of this drop of blackness, he becomes black and suffers all of indignities and injustices to which that community is routinely subjected. Neil's ordinariness--his blandly universal whiteness--might tempt us to read subtext here as: be nice to blacks, because you might be one yourself. The novel's solution to problem, in this reading, thus mirrors logic of self-interest central to earlier passing novels in its as equally unsatisfying kind of solution--namely, self-interested kind. Kingsblood Royal, however, departs from traditional approaches to passing genre. Throughout, Neil doesn't fear being revealed by others, he fears revealing himself; he flirts with but ultimately rejects idea of leaving his white wife a more compatible and sympathetic African American woman; most prominently, decision to come out as black occurs not as novel's climax but as its middle portion. (2) In other words, though Kingsblood Royal invokes many of ideas and tropes of passing novel, this is not a about passing. Two relatively recent critics have recognized its somewhat different ambitions. Robert McLaughlin sees in understanding of white/black opposition as rooted in the societal power it supports (8): makes clear that money and power are what is really at stake in White Supremacy racket (14).Jennifer Delton has argued that is less about racial boundaries per se than about how race issues bear on usual primary target of middle class banality; she suggests that for Lewis Babbittry, and so novel's main concern was not so much black people attaining their civil rights, ... but rather white people liberating themselves from bleak horrors of whiteness (327). (3) In these analyses, passing is important in Kingsblood Royal how it points to other concerns. Other critics have read as interested primarily in deconstruction of logic of racial boundaries. Seen (merely) in this light, it does indeed appear--as many have argued--flat and unconvincing, and critics have found virulent racism of white citizens of otherwise mild Midwestern town of Grand Republic wildly extreme and implausible. In his well-known dismissal of (and talents of Lewis himself), example, Warren Beck found racial attitudes in to be broad, melodramatic, and farcical (176). …

Letter of Reference

You were my oldest-lasting friend but that’s now severed, The divorces simultaneous, your black brother, your white wife, One potato two potato three potato four. Consider this a letter, elegy if you will, For something perished, for the heavy tree Root bound, trapped, swarmed by rats. I will not save you. The debt of blackness that I owe you has been eased, Many thousands gone. Brash, black and Brooklyn-hip, The leverage tilted to you, yours the moral mandate Of the black-rap field nigger sixties that you scooped. I ransomed the guilt of my forebears The high yellow creole stock, Painful bondage, still a slave, The honors yours, the harvest combed From what I gave, many thousands gone, Gone, the insular caste dissolved in my mother’s time, The Teches, Allimonos, Trepaniers, the brilliant women, The shrewd and lethal men, always on the fringe Of black or white, Latin in style, Colored in substance, Pan-American in range, The flittings over the color lines, the tack of their journey In the slow ship of race on sullen seas Yet to be completed, this journey still in my bloodlines. I trace it, extend it like star charts, The night navigation of birds—These puzzled parts were mine, a nose here, A hand there, an ear, a toe, the whole man Not assembled, only the veiled vision, Baffled fury of my failing parents, Their dim chant and chart of guidance Like the riddles carved on an old crypt, The incoherent hum and curse of something inside Not yet dead.

Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney (review)

Reviewed by: Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney Nicholas Wood (bio) Keywords Slavery, Virginia, Slave trade Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia. By John J. Zaborney. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Pp. 218. Cloth, $42.50.) Examining an understudied topic, John J. Zaborney demonstrates the extent, variety, and importance of slave hiring in antebellum Virginia. Slave hiring was a profit-maximizing practice that often belied paternalistic notions of slavery. Planters with surplus slaves could supplement their income by hiring out a few slaves or hire them all out while traveling for extended periods of time. Churches, orphanages, and schools raised funds by hiring out slaves they owned for that purpose. Males and females were hired in roughly equal numbers as field hands, domestic servants, coal miners, and railroad builders. By the 1850s slave hiring was so commonplace that rental agreements were standardized and preprinted, as were insurance policies for hired slaves working in especially dangerous occupations. Drawing on deep archival research and weaving many compelling anecdotes into a coherent whole, Zaborney demonstrates how the hiring process shaped the lives of white Virginians, the enslaved, and the institution of slavery itself. Zaborney characterizes the existing scholarship on slave hiring as "polarized: hired slaves either enjoyed nearly full autonomy, which weakened slavery generally, or they endured ruthless exploitation" (2). While this binary is somewhat exaggerated, it helps place Zaborney's work in the context of larger debates about slave agency and the compatibility of slavery and modernization. He argues that "most Virginia hired slaves' experiences differed little from those of nonhired slaves and that slave hiring made Virginia slavery stronger, not weaker, during the years before the Civil War" (3). Slave hiring helped slaveholders adapt to the dynamic and unpredictable economic changes that characterized the market revolution. Hired slaves also helped build transportation infrastructure and worked in factories, demonstrating the compatibility of enslaved labor with a modernizing economy. Renting slaves could create conflicts of interests between owners and hirers, thus creating opportunities for slaves to exert a greater level of agency, themes examined at length in the only other full-length study on [End Page 580] the subject.1 By contrast, Zaborney focuses more on the mutual interests of white Virginians and the ways that slave hiring increased white solidarity. It helped reduce class tensions by allowing tenant farmers to rent slaves they could not afford to buy and thereby achieve the "free and independent status [of] white men who controlled slaves" (108). Hiring a female domestic slave could save a white wife from household drudgery, allowing her to emulate middle-class gender ideals without the full expense of slave ownership. For white men, attending slave hiring days (generally at the start of the year) provided opportunities to publicly display their masculinity and mastery as they examined slaves and haggled over prices. Thus the economic, cultural, and social implications of slave hiring increased support for slavery even among non-slave-owning whites. Zaborney gives examples of some slaves who earned significant sums of money through incentives for overtime, or turned the competing economic interests of owners and hirers to their own advantage. But he also reports cases in which slaves' attempts to exert agency resulted in whipping or sale as punishment, arguing that slaves' agency remained sharply curtailed in most situations. Moreover, even when slaves successfully used opportunities created by hiring to exert more influence over their own lives, it was generally with the goal of mitigating problems resulting from being hired out in the first place, such as family dislocation and brutal work conditions. As Zaborney shows, slaves always struggled to preserve a level of stability and autonomy in their lives, but hiring created at least as many problems as opportunities. Throughout his book, Zaborney touches on connections between slave hiring and the domestic slave trade. Slave owners and hirers viewed renting slaves as an alternative to the domestic slave trade; slaves were more likely to be hired out at least once than they were to be sold; and slaves who created trouble for their owners or hirers might be sold as punishment. Like the slave trade, slave hiring...

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

A Visual Critique of Racism: African American Art from Southern California

The "Quadroon-Placage" Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon

The intimate relationships between white men and women of color in antebellum New Orleans, commonly known by the term plaçage, are a large part of the romanticized lore of the city and its history. This article exposes the common understanding of plaçage as myth. First, it reveals the source of the myth in a collection of accounts by travelers to the city in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Next, it uses a database of information on hundreds of white male-colored female relationships during the period to provide a more accurate account of the people in and nature of these relationships. Finally, it explains the purpose served by the myth by identifying three traditions that shaped its development: the culture of Southern Honor, the Anti-Slavery movement, and the bon-ton tradition of Georgian England. In a broader sense, this paper shows how myths are created and perpetuated, the temptations and dangers of uncritically accepting them, and the value to understanding their creation.

Fear Mongering, Media Intimidation, and Political Machinations: Tracing the Agendas Behind the All God's Chillun Got Wings Controversy

In this article, I will argue that one of the most controversial productions in American theater history, perceived largely as an event provoked by racial prejudice, ought be re-examined in terms of the savvy political agendas behind the text. History remembers the contention surrounding Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings as simple case of racial intolerance, bur the truth proves much different, involving personal threats, government action, and constant attacks from the press mounted by two political powers. Both participants feared political irrelevance, and the prospect of losing influence or prominence inspired them reassert their clout by intimidating O'Neill and his cast. An exploration of the context behind the Chillun controversy reveals story of hidden machinations concerning political ambition and desperate attempts retain power. In early summer of 1924, the Provincetown Playhouse premiered Eugene O'Neill's newest work, All God's Chillun Got Wings. While O'Neill originally wrote the piece as one-act play for George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in the fall of 1923, he later expanded it into a drama in two acts and seven scenes set in lower New York at an unspecified rime. (1) O'Neill's racial theme is rather clumsily handled at the beginning and then powerfully at the end. The first act traces the development of the relationship between Jim and Ella, beginning as childhood playmates who tease each other about the color of their skin while playing game of marbles on the sidewalk. The act continues by charting fourteen-year period highlighting Jim's inability overcome racial barriers in order pursue his desired romance with Ella. O'Neill's racially charged dialogue during this opening act unfortunately fails provide an emotional or intellectual impact because the immaturity of the two major characters, combined with the simplistic depiction of the secondary characters who hurl racial epithets, weakens dialogue that is based on racial tension. When the act concludes with Jim and Ella emerging from chapel as wedded couple, O'Neill provides little indication of the serious issues he addresses in the second half of the play. O'Neill salvages All God's Chillun Got Wings with second act that shifts from storytelling emphasis an exploration of tenuous romance between two human beings fighting against lifelong prejudices that conflict with their quests for love and validation. Ella constantly berates Jim for his lofty aspirations become lawyer, fearing that he will no longer fit in the stereotype that allowed her feel superior. In addition suffering her brutal verbal attacks, Jim is harassed by his sister, who questions why he continues endure Ella's abuse in the name of undying love. With Jim's defiance (if not ignorance) toward the external forces aiming doom his relationship and his confidence, O'Neill presents man determined to become someone other than who he and both his black friends and his white wife try shame him into staying who he is, resulting in drama that demonstrates not only the trauma of race relations but of the human condition in general. (2) While this racial subject matter certainly raised eyebrows and kept conservative audience members away from the theater, the premiere production of Chillun is most often remembered for one single moment. Most references Chillun in theater history books are accompanied by brief recounting of the controversial staging at the play's conclusion, when Ella kneels on the floor and kisses Jim's hand. It is this moment--when the white actress Mary Blair kissed Paul Robeson's hand--that sparked an incredible controversy that captured headlines and evoked vitriolic responses from all over the country. (3) Those who denounced O'Neill's work as an explosive face play ignored the many complex issues raised during the second half of the script. The concluding moment of the play involves not white woman's submission black man but, instead, tearful plea return their innocent childhood, when they treated each other with greater respect and dignity. …

‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa

Based on archival research in Ghana and Britain, this article documents the sustained but failed attempts of working‐class West African seamen to repatriate to the colonies with their European wives during the interwar years. Colonial authorities crafted policies to prevent these couples from making British West Africa home because they feared that the presence of European women living ‘in native fashion’ with their African husbands would destabilise colonial race relations. After discussing the origins of this policy in the context of the 1919 race riots that swept Britain's port cities, the article draws on the case of a West African man married to a German woman to illuminate how concerns about race, sex, gender, nationality and class informed the politics of repatriation to British West Africa during the interwar years.

The Hunter and the Farmer: Jean Toomer’s Depression-Era Masculinist Writings

In 1937, after he had written the novel Cane, left the African-American culture of Harlem, studied under the mystic Georges Gurdjieff in France, lost his wife to childbirth, and married for the second time, Jean Toomer sought to publish a series of essays. The subjects varied, but the most common theme was masculinity—men’s prerogatives, natures, and responsibilities. He theorized women’s temperaments as well, but it was clearly the study of maleness that captured his attention.&#x0D; &#x0D; Toomer’s interest was noteworthy given the fact that he became ever more concerned with sexuality and gender as he left behind his African-American identity. Toomer did not intend to “pass,” as is commonly assumed—he actually wanted to be raceless, or of the “American” race. In his adopted home in the Pennsylvania countryside, Toomer attempted to construct his life based entirely on his masculinity. In Toomer’s opinion, his entire household-- his white wife, his light-skinned daughter, and various temporary occupants—was a social experiment in supporting his masculine genius and creativity.&#x0D; &#x0D; This essay is an intellectual history of Toomer’s self-construction. Using his diaries and published and unpublished writings, I will explain how Toomer saw his own male identity and how, although he had renounced his blackness, his racial identity mediated his ideal of his gender.

Interracial marriage and family socio-economic well-being: Equal status exchange or caste status exchange?

Minorities outmarried to Whites are often assumed to exchange their higher achieved status for an ascribed racial status. This study challenges this traditional exchange perspective by examining three SES measures (education, job prestige and income), using census 2000 PUMS data. Findings indicate that couples have similar statuses in all types of marriages, either endogamous or exogamous, and there is no evidence of status-caste exchange in intermarriage to Whites, except in Asian husband–White wife marriages in income (not in education or job prestige). Equal status exchange in intermarriages, however, may have stratified racial groups, especially for Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Hispanics. Intermarriage thus widens gaps of inequality between endogamous minorities and endogamous Whites through equal status exchange between spouses.

"Delusionary Thinking, Whether White or Black or in Between": Fictions of Race in Philip Roth's The Human Stain

As early as 1948, almost a decade before the hipster came to prominence in Norman Mailer's notorious essay Negro,1 Anatole Broyard, in his Partisan Review piece A Portrait of the Hipster, defined this genuinely American rebel figure as a keeper of enigmas, ironical pedagogue, a self-appointed exegete (724).2 In his secrecy-infused pedagogical capacity as both former professor of classics and once well-respected dean of Athena College, Coleman Silk, the protagonist of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, seems to match perfectly Broyard's description of the hipster,3 This mapping of the hipster discourse on Silk's personality, however, is a doubly ironic one, for Silk's genealogy is certainly not the genealogy of a white hipster traceable back to a subculture-and yet it is. Insofar as Silk's major aim of life is to reject the very existentialist synapses of the that the hipster so ardently absorbs while modeling his prospects on the plight of the American black, the identification with this same figure has to be repudiated. In particular for Mailer's so-called practical purposes of life, Silk could not be considered a white Negro (White 341). What puts him, probably unwillingly, on equal footing with the hipster nevertheless is his desire to pass racial boundaries of some sort by assuming the characteristics of the opposite race. In Silk's case, of course, this pass is additionally backed up by his physical appearance. His light skin and white features both facilitate and radicalize his decision to pass. Contrary to the hipster, though, he will not want anybody to know about his passing. Ned Polsky's critique of Negro, in which he accuses Mailer of ignoring the fact that whereas the white member of the hipster subculture is attracted to the member of the latter's Negroness, [. . .] the Negro [. . .] is attracted to the white precisely because of his whiteness, points to another crucial difference between the two figures, and works in Silk's favor as far as it differentiates him from the hipster (Mailer, Note 368). But as much as Polsky's attack on Mailer remains confined within the logic of passing-taken as the core of the hipster figure-the figure of Silk remains imprisoned within the racial discourse of the hipster. Within this particular logic, it does not seem to make a big difference whether Silk is a whitened Negro instead of a white Negro; nor does it seem to matter much if one prefers to call him a blackened Jew in his decision to masquerade in the particular disguise of a Jewish white man. For Coal Man Silk, neither Jewish nor white, attempts-however differently from the hipster-to pass, just like the hipster. All he needs to do is to replace the black man's code to fit [his] facts for the white man's code (Mailer, White 341). Unfortunately, although his originally successful acts of self-creation in his professional as well as his personal life (even his white wife Iris Gittelman dies unaware of his skin color) have particularized him as a white man, Silk turns out to be very different from Broyard's discrete, critical, and self-defining entity. Insofar as the hipster (Jewish in most cases) could be viewed as an inauthentic Jew, Silk, in denying his blackness, could then be regarded as an inauthentic Negro (Broyard, Inauthentic 56-64). Whatever ethnic denominator one chooses, they both have in common an implicit questioning of what it means to be American. Being American seems to always already presuppose an act of self-fashioning and the assumption of a mask, whether or not this mask may be configured as a racial disguise, or disguised as a racial configuration. Being American in Roth means the creation of a set of fictions about his black, white, and Jewish protagonist, and the hipster figure is only one of them. The point of this article is that Roth's specific use of humor undermines the fictions he sets up-which in many ways are America's racial fictions-from within his own fiction about America. …