Such is the strength of issues of race, particularly in Baldwin’s debut novel, that in critiquing his second novel, which appears to have no black characters, academics such as Aliyyah I. Taxonomy is a process of exclusion rather than inclusion, and Baldwin was well aware of the problems that white Americans’ self-taxonomising had created for those excluded, as the encounters between the races showed in his 1953 novel Go Tell It On The Mountain. White people invented black people to give white people identity”(88) and Audre Lorde put it thus: “ that we must identify ourselves (because if we don’t, someone else will to our detriment) is a human problem” (Hammond 10). James Baldwin attested to the artificial nature of these constructs in his conversation with Nikki Giovanni: “People invent categories in order to feel safe.
He does not, however, deny the strength that has accrued to such constructs, nor how commonly such ideas have been held, nor that they had, up to the time of writing, continued to be used as excuses for killing (ibid.). He goes on to refer to categories based on skin colour as “pseudoscientific,” and to describe them as “arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality”(6). When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or ‘the Aryan race.” we speak in biological misnomers ”(4) Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction. In his 1985 editorial in Critical Enquiry, “Writing “Race” and the Difference it Makes,” Henry Louis Gates Jr.
0 kommentar(er)
