the minnesota review n.s. 47 (1997)Gayle WaldAlong the Color Line: Memory, Community, Identity(on Judy Scales-Trent, Notes of a White Black Woman: Race, Color Community [University Park: Penn State UP, 1995]); and Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black [New York: Dutton, 1995])Of the many dismaying aspects of the television coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, perhaps none was more predictable than the media's discovery of "two Americas": one white, one black. On the evening news, the narrative that came to be known as the Aftermath of the Verdict consisted of two obsessively replayed sets of images-one of black people celebrating the jury's decision to acquit Simpson, a second of white people registering shock and dismay at their perception of justice gone awry. Although news anchors assured viewers of the authenticity of these representations, nevertheless the careful framing of popular response to the verdict-and hence, the careful framing of race-was evident everywhere. In a number of the broadcasts I watched, for example, "black response" to the verdict was solicited by plainclothes reporters stationed on street corners or in the occasional barbershop. By contrast, "white response" to the verdict was sought by professionally attired reporters stationed in suburban cafes and bars, where happy-hour patrons had been cued to offer their "spontaneous," two-second assessments of the Trial of the Century. This racialized framing of popular response to the O.J. Simpson trial had a number of effects. First, the dramatic juxtaposition of two competing sets of images reinforced and even naturalized a prevailing thesis of racial binarism, in which "black" and "white" define the terrain of racial subjectivities (to the exclusion, it should be noted, of related social factors such as class, region, gender or age). Second, because blacks and whites were depicted as generally monolithic groups, each capable of voicing only prior, seemingly biologically based opinions, the television media's representations conflated race with ideology. Moreover, by portraying public response to the verdict in terms of two opposed, racially derived interpretations, the TV news all but completely erased from media visibility subjects who could comfortably occupy neither of these preordained positions. This neither/nor group included ideological "race traitors"-for example, white women who supported the jury's verdict-as well as those racial "others" who habitually go by other names. To be sure, the trial of O.J. Simpson furnished the news media with a multiplicity of potential racial or ethnic "angles"; in addition to a black defendant, it involved a Jewish victim, a Japanese-American judge, Hispanic domestic workers, a "mixed" jury and "integrated" legal teams. In the end, however, these complexities were abandoned for a narrative that privileged white voices. Indeed, in light of shows such as CBS News' series of "town meetings"-slickly produced media forums masquerading as the new public sphere-not only were the voices of Latinos and Asian-Americans largely absent, but also black men and women who expressed solidarity with victims of domestic violence were barely given a voice-or, if they were, then only as anomalous cases whose existence lent credence to the representation of univocality within each racial group.1 To raise—once again—the issue of race in the O.J. Simpson trial may seem an odd way to introduce two recent autobiographical books by black Americans in "white-skin disguise," as one of the book's authors, Penn State law professor Judy Scales-Trent, puts it. Yet like the trial, these two books—Gregory Howard Williams' Life on the Color Line, and Scales-Trent's Notes of a White Black Woman—remind us that race is itself a narrative. The Simpson spectacle, especially the flood of racist media coverage unleashed by the announcement of the verdict, was but the most recent reminder of the poverty of our public mediated discourse on race, a discourse that these books take pains to critique. For Williams and Scales-Trent, both of whom "look" white but who "are" black, the inability to take refuge in definitional certainties about race is at times a source of frustration. Yet "life on the color line," as Williams' book puts it, is also a source of insight into the effects of received racial narratives, into how U.S. ideas of racial binarism and racial embodiment are produced and maintained. Following a path forged by Adrian Piper, a philosopher and artist who has addressed similar themes, first in a well known media installation titled Cornered and later in an essay in Transition (see Piper), Williams and Scales-Trent write about race as a matter of particular personal absurdity and sometimes bewilderment, contradiction and pain. As the awkwardness of Scales-Trent's title attests, the knowledge that "black" and "white" are terms without stable referentiality (both historically and in the present moment) does not, in and of itself, deplete their power. For Williams and Scales-Trent, both of whom came of age during an era of legal segregation, the dilemma posed by the notion of fixed, biological racial categories is no less challenging in 1996, at the contradictory moment when-as the O.J. trial showed us-"black" and "white" take on greater signifying power even as they become more patently obsolete. "There is something about living on the margins of race that gives me a unique view of the categories 'black' and 'white,' that presents a different picture of white Americans and black Americans, of America itself," writes Scales-Trent near the beginning of her collection of personal essays, some of which have the feel of journal entries. "For my position does not allow me the luxury of thinking that the notion of race makes any sense" (7). Notes of a White Black Woman echoes recent scholarly works by Theodore Allen, F. James Davis, Vron Ware, David Roediger, Eric Lott and Robyn Wiegman (among others) in asserting that, calls to abandon certainties about race notwithstanding, "black" and "white" have never been stable terms of analysis (see also Fishkin). Scales-Trent addresses this point most powerfully in her discussion of the infamous one-drop rule, which limited the legal and economic rights of the descendants of white slaveowners by institutionalizing hypodescent. The one-drop rule, she implies, paradoxically recognized the instability of U.S. racial discourse insofar as it sought to fix race biologically, even and especially in cases in which the embodiment of the subject belied pat categorization. Rather than functioning as the reflection or effect of definitional certainty about race, the one-drop rule instead functioned as an attempt to produce racial truths in the face of radical uncertainties. The notion that race is embodied-that bodies, as Wiegman puts it, "have" a race-is one that concerns those of us who profess to know what we are no less than it concerns Scales-Trent, whose diverse heritage gives rise to competing narratives that, she argues, preclude the construction of a coherent or stable racial self. Despite these and other insights in Notes of a White Black Woman, Scales-Trent's book is not ultimately as successful as related academic works. This is not because Notes of a White Black Woman is not conventionally scholarly, mixing memoir with less personalized theoretical inquiry, but because Scales-Trent feels a necessity, in the final analysis, to celebrate an idea(l) of racial and cultural hybridity that belies the complexity of both her lived experience and her theoretical insights. While there may be some value to observations such as "Mother Africa is mother to us all. And we are all African-Americans," these come off as too glib next to Scales-Trent's descriptions of some of the very real challenges that she faces, such as what to do in the face of hostility from law school colleagues who challenge her right to represent black experience to her students or to identify herself as authentically African-American. Similarly, the inclusiveness of formulas such as "we are all"-formulas which recall the superficial, universalist slogans of commodity culture, from Live Aid to Nike-seem banal next to Scales-Trent's rather complicated series of recollections of her early childhood in the segregated South. For her, Jim Crow defined a zone of exclusion as well as a zone of inclusion, a space where she was allowed to indulge her sense of belonging precisely because she had no other choice. As an adult, Scales-Trent is understandably ambivalent about being the beneficiary of white skin privileges. She cites "the guilt of a survivor" and wishes that her hair-as she puts it, her one tangible connection to Africa-were kinkier. Because race, as a social identity, requires the recognition/corroboration of others, it is the fear of not belonging, of being misrecognized, that haunts her: "This is my nightmare. It is during race riots in the city. I am in my car, trying to reach safety, and am pulled from the car and beaten by four young black men as I drive through a black neighborhood: 'You white bitch!'" (86). Notes of a White Black Woman is informed by the some of the same contradictory impulses that shape, to one degree or another, related works that attempt to narrativize white racial identity, from Dorothy Allison's collection Skin to Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: namely, the desire both to use and to abolish race as a lens of critical analysis. This emerges most obviously in the relationship Scales-Trent imagines between race and biology. Asserting, on the one hand, that the racial identity of all Americans is radically hybridized and that her embodiment as a "white black woman" confounds conventional ways of thinking about race, Scales-Trent also constructs a narrative of shared biological origin, in which all people are the descendants of an African Eve. The obvious problem with such a claim of common human ancestry is that it grounds its critique of racism in the very same evolutionary, genetic principles that are easily manipulated toward totalitarian ends. As an alternative to Scales-Trent's romanticized narrative of a shared Mother, I prefer the wit of her three-step program, "How to Tell if You Are White," a test which gives new meaning to the phrase "living a lie": How to Tell if You Are White
If Gregory Williams, author of Life on the Color Line and now dean of the law school at Ohio State University, had administered Scales-Trent's test to his parents then they most certainly would have failed Question #3. Williams' earliest memories are of the ruckus inside his parents' roadside tavern and restaurant, which catered to the soldiers stationed at a nearby Norfolk, Virginia, army training camp. Although the family's fortunes take a dive when the tavern goes out of business, it is not until Williams' mother storms out, taking his two youngest siblings with her and leaving his father with Williams and his younger brother Mike, that the boys' lives undergo radical change. Most shockingly, their father informs them that he is a "colored" man who had been passing for white, and that they too are "colored" boys. As such, he tells them, they are moving to Muncie, Indiana, where they will eventually share a run-down shack with their grandmother, Miss Sallie, whom his parents had once hired to work in their tavern. Even as a child, Williams is clear-eyed about the social and economic significance of his father's revelation: "We were colored!" he remembers thinking. "After ten years in Virginia on the white side of the color line, I knew what that meant" (34). In Muncie, what money there is supports their father's and grandmother's drinking; when money is short the boys often go hungry. A particularly significant event unfolds one night at Joe's Rib Joint, where their father forces the boys to perform for spare change, announcing to the restaurant's patrons that Gregory, his "white son," will recite the "Gettysburg Address" while Michael, "the nigger and small-time hustler," will display his "athletic prowess" (154). As a male narrative of paternal abuse, Life on the Color Line recalls recent books such as Tobias Wolff's The Duke of Deception or Pat Conroy's The Great Santini. In Williams' book, however, his father's excesses, understood in the context of poverty, illness and frustrated ambitions, are unequal to the betrayal committed by his mother. Whatever her reasons for leaving town with only two of her children, for Williams her refusal to acknowledge her sons is ineradicably linked to race, a notion which is reinforced by Williams' white grandparents' failure to visit or to offer material support, despite the fact that they live nearby in "white" Muncie. By thus associating his own mother's cruelty and disloyalty with white supremacy, Life on the Color Line links supposedly mundane traumas associated with racism to the dynamics of betrayal, loss, cruelty and outrage within the family. If Life on the Color Line is a survivor's narrative in the style of the stories told by the victims of incest, then Williams' contribution to this literature consists of his indictment of racism (in this case, racism within families) as a source of child abuse. The marketing department at Dutton, Williams' publisher, apparently decided to pitch Life on the Color Line to a readership nurtured on talk shows and, therefore, accustomed to melodrama. Citing Williams' "confused identity," the press release asserts that Williams was "not fully accepted by either the black or the white communities"-a patent untruth that underrates the compassion of Miss Dora, a black woman who intervenes to take care of the boys and whose sacrifices on their behalf can only be described as heroic. The image of psychological confusion promulgated by the press materials echoes century-old representations of the "tragic mulatto," depicted as pitifully suspended between two worlds, condemned to a life of sorrow and unfulfillment. The book's title notwithstanding, Life on the Color Line dwells only occasionally on Williams' sense of liminality and even less on his "confusion," but instead emphasizes just how little ambiguity there is, particularly where his white relatives are concerned, around the question of his racial "belonging." Less tragic than stoic, Williams' is a cautionary tale about crossing the color line, one which equates the psychic violence of passing with the psychic violence inflicted by the dominant culture. Rejecting his father's repeated advice to "cross over," Williams instead looks for inspiration to Walter White, the blond-haired, blue-eyed leader of the NAACP, a man who sometimes risked his life by passing for white to investigate lynchings. While the vicissitudes of Williams' life may resemble those of Iola Leroy, the title character of Francis Harper's 1892 novel who experiences a similarly abrupt change in racial status, Life on the Color Line ends up in literary territory more familiar from African-American men's memoirs of the 1990s: with Gregory going to college and then law school, and his brother Mike heading for a career as a petty criminal before being seriously wounded in a fight. The Cain/Abel trajectory of Williams' narrative links Life on the Color Line to other cautiously celebratory tales of black male upward mobility, where the narrator's satisfaction at having made it mingles with his guilt at having left someone behind-here, as in so many other cases, a brother. What distinguishes Williams' memoir, which says very little about his life after he leaves Muncie for college, is that he is haunted both by a cognizance of the disparities between his and his brother's lives (as if they were living out the roles their father imagined for them so many years earlier) and by an ironic awareness that these roles reproduce the social logic of the color line. What is finally striking about Life on the Color Line and Notes of a White Black Woman is their authors' desire to construct coherent narratives of racial identity through autobiography. Along with books like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice and Johnny Otis's Upside the Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue, Williams' memoir and Scales-Trent's essays begins to chart the personal territory-more precisely, the terrain of memory, community and experience-less pointedly explored in academic scholarship about the social construction of race. Works like these, which illustrate the precise ways in which race is a fiction whose effects are nevertheless real, may thus take a place beside historical texts which detail the process by which races are invented, sociological critiques of racial formation, or studies of the cultural (re)production of-or resistance to-racial ideologies in the public sphere. NoteWorks Cited
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