Black People and Birdie Essay

In her novel Caucasia, Danzy Senna paints the image of a young bi-racial girl, wench, growing up in the 70s and 80s. Her mother is a white, blueblood Bostonian woman turned political activist, and her father is a downcast Boston University professor with radical ideas about race. wench and her sure- decent(a) sister Cole are both bi-racial children, but Cole looks more corrosive and Birdie looks more white. The two sisters are separated early in the novel and then the rest of the story focuses on Birdie and how she needs to pass as white.Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of social groups other than his or her own, such as a different race, ethnicity, social class, or gender, generally with the purpose of gaining social acceptance. Birdies existence is the ultimate experiment on how to pass. She is first asked to pass as black at Nkrumah, even though she doesnt barrack the compose of a black child. Then she is taken to New Hampshire and asked to be the opposite of what shed been before- a white Jewish girl.Senna introduces Birdie to all different versions of the races she is lacerate between, and none of them seem to fit quite right. Through Birdie, Senna is making the point we see that there is no one size fits all version of some(prenominal) race. Birdie is exposed to many different ideas of what it means to be black while shes younger, even though the general idea of the time was very specific. All of the adults around her are busy preaching this idea of The Black Person, but they are showing her all different versions of what that really means.The first intuitive feeling she gets of a black person is her father who in the past year had discovered Black Pride and was trying to purge himself of his honkified past(10). Deck is an cerebral he studied at Harvard and is a professor at Boston University. However by the time his daughters are old enough to really alternate understanding things, he has gotten caught up in the idea of The Black Person, saying things about his sister like she sleeps with these white boys, then acts surprised when they dont take her home for dinner.I told her, these ofays just want their thirty minutes of difference(10). Hes relation back his daughters that the way to truly be black is to have no association with white people, which is a direct contradiction of his own life and something that is impossible for them to do given their genealogy. Hes telling them theres no way for them to be the ideological black person. Then the girls go to Nkrumah, a black power school. This school is supposed to be about owning your race and being proud of being black, but Birdie isnt initially accepted well because shes not black enough.The way she becomes more accepted is through her sister, but also because she assimilates to the idea of black culture that her school has. She reads Ebony magazine, speaks in a specific slang, dresses otherwise and does her hair in a braid to hide its s moothness. At Nkrumah, she tries to live as though she doesnt have a white mother. However, thats not who she is. She says that she learned the art of changing at Nkrumah, a skill that would later become second nature(62). Shes acknowledging here that this all black persona isnt who she is.Shes simply changing, pretending. Pretending is what Birdie has to do for most of this book, but as she gets older instead of needing to pass as black, she needs to instead adopt a new identity as Jesse Goldman, a Jewish white girl. She maintains in her mind that she is black, and is just pretending with her white half(prenominal). time using this persona, and having the mindset that she is just gathering information on whiteness, Birdie gets painted a picture of different types of white people.In an authoritative sense, Birdie gets ideas about being white from her mother and her mothers boyfriend Jim. Jim is the type of white man who likes to act like hes spare until it comes down to real worl d circumstances. After causing a scene with some young black men, Jim says I swear, I try to be liberal. I try really, really hard. But when you meet fucking punks like that, you start to wonder. I mean, Jesus, what did we do to deserve that? Were on their side and they dont even know it (265).Jim is the white man who sees his liberality as a gift instead of a belief. Birdie says about this that it scared me a short. how easily they could become cowering white folks, nothing more, nothing less (264). To contrast these this very negative views of what it means to be white, Birdie also has her mother as a model. Despite coming from an upper class, white family and the struggles that she has with that, Sandy is a white person who firmly believes in equality, even if she may take it to extremes.She tells her daughters that government werent complicated. They were simple. People, she said, deserved four basic things food, love, shelter, and a good education (22). This is the opposite fr om what Birdie has seen in other white people. Her mother doesnt take back to racism or abandon her views when it comes time for her to uphold them. Finally, Birdie befriends the most racist girls in school saying its because there was a safeguard in this pantomime. The less she behaved like herself, the more she could believe that this was still a game(233).However, as much as shed like to say shes acting, she assimilates to this culture just like she did the black culture at Nkrumah I was a New Hampshire girl nowwe dressed identically cutoff blue jean short, halter tops that exposed our tan bellies, and jelly shoes on our feet (244-245). This version of being white was a skin Birdie could slide on easily, even if she didnt really want to. The only thing that shocks her out of the comfort shes fallen into in this identity is the fact that another half black girl recognizes that shes not fully white Im black, like you (286).None of these ideas about race fit Birdie. She cannot ex actly fit into a version of what it means to be white because thats not the only part of who she is. She also cannot be fully black, not only because she has inflame skin but also because thats not the only part of her heritage that exists. Birdie is the perfect example of how multidimensional race is. There is no one way to be black and there is no one way to be white. Race isnt one size fits all.