What Birdie learns is that race, like many other issues of identity is mutable, if your appearance is "passable." One thing that is particualy interesting is that blackness is an ideal in the work, and the white daughter (Birdie) is not the favored daughter. "Danzy Senna's 1998 novel, Caucasia, casts blackness as the ideal, desired identity. For protagonist Birdie Lee and her sister, Cole -- offspring of a civil rights movement union between their white activist mother and black intellectual father -- whiteness simply pales in comparison. (Harrison-Kahan 19) to a great degree whiteness is constructed as a lesser identity to blackness, based on cultural richness and identity, through appearance and inner knowledge. This is reflective of the Black Power movement that is idealized in this work by the Black Panther movement. To be black was to be a personal source of pride and any lessor version of it elicited less power and should elicit less pride. Upon separating, from her Father and sister Birdie finds herself in a mutable state of the unknown, where her name and identity can change on the whim of her mother and her reality is shockingly different than her historical development of black identity. The resolution for Birdie is the development of self acceptance that begins with a reunion with her sister and ends with the melding o her self-identity as both black and white, rather than one or the other.

Although Caucasia, as I stated at the beginning of this article, privileges blackness over whiteness, the novel does not end with the act of "loving blackness" alone (see hooks 9-20). Instead, Caucasia concludes with a validation of multiplicity. At the end of the novel, Birdie rediscovers her black self when she is reunited with Cole. The two sisters decide to make a new home together in the culturally diverse, liberal landscape of Berkeley, California where biracial children are "a dime a dozen" (412). In the last paragraph of the novel, Birdie indulges in her own fantasy of...

Passing a school bus, she looks up at the faces of the students: "They were black and Mexican and Asian and white, on the verge of puberty, but not quite in it. They were utterly ordinary, throwing obscenities and spitballs at one another the ways kids do." (Harrison-Kahan 19)
The demonstration of white as lesser, as well as Birdie's identity as white had to be resolved in order for her life to become what it needed to become, i.e. A resolution of multiplicity. The hierarchy of blackness is a clear social construct that has rarely been written about and whiteness as a position of being what one can only describe as "underdone" by many in the black culture is a significant social issue for Birdie as well as her whole social construct.

Dagbovie 93) One of the last concepts of the work that deals with race is the idea of the "canary in a coal mine" theory detailed by Deck, who believes that the mixed race people of the world serve the purpose of going into the world as did canatries in a mine, to test the social construct of race and challenge the definitions of "white" "black" and somewhere in the middle. Birdie, serves this purpose in the novel, but she also serves her own purpose of defining what it means to her to be "white" "black" or more appropriately somewhere in between. (Senna 393)

Works Cited

Bayes, Jane H. Minority Politics and Ideologies in the United States. Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp, 1982.

Dagbovie, Sika Alaine. "Fading to White, Fading Away: Biracial Bodies in Michelle Cliff's Abeng and Danzy Senna's Caucasia." African-American Review 40.1 (2006): 93.

Harrison-Kahan, Lori. "Passing for White, Passing for Jewish: Mixed Race Identity in Danzy Senna and Rebecca Walker." MELUS 30.1 (2005): 19.

Senna, Danzy. Caucasia. New York: Riverhead Trade, 1999.

Willie, Charles V., ed. Black/Brown/White Relations: Race Relations in the 1970s. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction…