Caucasia: geography, history, and regional significance

Caucasia - Danzy Senna

The historical and social context of the novel Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, is the 1970s in America. The period of the 1970s is marked as one of the most tumultuous in the history of the nation for several reasons not the least of which the civil rights movement backlash, where those who fought for advances in civil right sin the 1960s realized that much of the changes that had occurred were legalistic only, and therefore would require significant work to address the more subtle forms of racism and sexism that existed as well as the backlash of those who believed that the civil rights movement had already gone far enough and needed to be stopped. (Willie 186) Both factions had moderate as well as fanatic wings and the civil rights organization that stands out most in the fanatic wing is the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers were a part of a larger Black Power movement that was in many ways inspired by the ideology of Malcolm X, who believed that racism was domestic colonialism and that black people were responsible for their own growth out of the stigma of it even if that meant violence.

Bayes 46) the Black Panthers were in a period of transition during the 1970s in which they began to become more mainstream in their desires, rather than utilizing violence and dissention to try to change the racial cast system in the U.S.

The Black Panther Party, however, was plagued by internal dissension and demoralized by the continuing toll inflicted on Panther members by police raids, arrests, trials, and prison sentences. By late 1971, Huey Newton admitted that "the Party was very wrong to think that it could change the police forces in the way we tried to do it.All we got was a war and a lot of bloodshed." 64 the Party had in its political activities moved away from the Black community. To become more effective, Newton argued, the Party had to return to the community and listen to the desires and needs of Black people. Throughout the 1970s, the Black Panthers continued to work for reform of the courts, juries, and prisons. They continued to speak out against police brutality and mounted campaigns against the Bakke and Watson cases which tested "reverse discrimination" in admission programs and in job opportunities. The Panthers also expanded their interest in international liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A sympathetic concern with the antinuclear movement was also a part of the Panther program in the late 1970s. 65 (Bayes 53)

It is believable that the characters within the work Caucasia were part of an earlier more illicit movement and the running of Birdie's mother (Sandy Lee) was as a result of fear of reprisal for her illegal activism (gun running) with the Black Panthers. The nation as a whole was also in a period of transition, having lived through the conservative 1950s, the rebellious 1960s and now the reforming 1970s, it was still ripe with social conflict associated with race and race relations.

Essay B:

The intersectional social constructions of whiteness presented in the novel Caucasia have to do with self-identity and social perspective. Birdie, a girl with no official name is the white appearing multiracial daughter of a white mother (Sandy Lee) and a black father (Deck Lee). To Birdie, who is at one point forced to "pass" as white in a new community where her mother eventually settles them after four years of running from the law and after Deck and her sister Cole leave them in an attempt to rebuild their own lives in Brazil. Birdie is the object of conflict from the beginning of her life, as her mother wants to call her Jesse (after her suffragette ancestor) and her father wants to name her Patrice after black African revolutionary Patrice Lumumba, there is never a resolution of the matter and Birdie goes without a legal name. (Senna 19) This fact is paramount to her own development as a person as the world in which Birdie lives is one of mutable identity, with pseudonyms and constantly changing social and cultural situations. 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 a racial utopia. 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)