The making and unmaking of whiteness: Richard Wright's Rite of Passage - Critical Essay

Richard Wright's Rite of Passage (1994) unmasks whiteness as a mark of ideology and racial privilege. Valerie Babb suggests that "a distinction should be made between white skin--the common pigmentation we associate with those we call white--and whiteness: .... whiteness is more than an appearance; it is a system of privileges accorded to those with white skin" (Babb 9). Coded as a norm for empowerment, whiteness is often a "representation of terror" (Hooks 172) in the black mind as a consequence of the values and attitudes that persist as the legacies of white racism. Whiteness, as the privileged signifier, constantly reminds us of power and control. "Power," as Michel Foucault has shown, "means relations, a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations" (198). Establishing the relationship between margins and center is an arbitrary social formation. The social construction of whiteness determines the discourse of white supremacy because it is built on both exclusion and racial subjugation. White supremacy powerfully affects the lives of blacks, particularly in Rite of Passage where whiteness operates in a social context, signifying "the right to exclude others" (Harris 108).

A posthumously published "novella which Wright completed in 1945 and later tried to include in Eight Men shortly before his death" (Butler 315), the story centers around the main character's rite of passage as he moves from being a prospective student to being a criminal. The fifteen-year-old black male protagonist Johnny Gibbs is a hard-working student at school, but his whole life is shattered when he learns that he has been a "foster" child all along and the city authorities demand that he should move to live with another family. As Arnold Rampersad indicates, Johnny's

   life is changed by the government bureaucracy in the area of human welfare
   and social services.... The power and carelessness of the white world may
   be inferred from the policies and actions of the authorities who insist
   that Johnny must be sent to a new home, even as it is clear that these
   authorities have only the most limited respect for blacks and the poor in
   general. (120)

Much like Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Fred Daniels in "The Man Who Lived Underground," Johnny is unable to deal with the crisis of identity when his life is dramatically changed.

Robert Butler rightfully suggests that Johnny's real dilemma lies in this very crisis: "Should he accept an identity arbitrarily constructed and imposed upon him by a social world which is unable to perceive him as a human being, or should he rebel absolutely, completely rejecting the standards of conventional society, and begin the task of building a radically isolated self?" (315-16). If we explore the question within the terrain of whiteness, the question boils down to whether Johnny should conform to the tenets of white supremacy or not. Because the conventions are produced by the inherent ideology of whiteness within the sociocultural constituents of domination, he rejects them and begins building a radically isolated self and becomes a non-conformist. Johnny's choice to be an outsider in becoming a member of the gang, "The Moochers," foreshadows his identity as a criminal through the rest of his life: he turns to the gang's solidarity, built on hostility against whites, to define the social boundaries of blackness.

The novel opens with Johnny in the classroom with his mind "winging away" from the voice of his white teacher, Mrs. Alma Reid, towards home. He is full of joy that he will soon be home for dinner with his family: "The white woman teacher's silver voice caressed his ears droningly, lulling him into the depths of a daydream centered about a bowl of steaming beef stew waiting for him upon the kitchen table" (1). Even though he is non-white, his whole identity is defined in terms of the social markers of whiteness: his report card is all A's in a school where the white teacher's authority is visible, and his success makes him feel that it is a "rosy world" (3) in which he is superior: "He caught a glimpse of a boy flashing a knife and he smiled superiorly" (3). He values education and success, reinforced by the teacher's approval, because they are the two things that give social meaning to whiteness. The teacher's "silver voice" has a "measured rhythm" (1) that reinforces social distance between whiteness and Johnny. A black boy in Harlem, whose identity is built against whiteness, Johnny is positioned in a social sphere where the white authority figure has the power to evaluate his work as a promising boy in the future. Education bears contradictions in the sense that Carter G. Woodson indicated in 1933: "The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white" (23). Johnny's identity is secured by school and home, the social institutions of the dominant white culture, but becoming "white" is impossible, for he is circumscribed by the unreachability of his white teacher, a situation he can transcend only through his daydreams of home which represent the lack of emotional identification between the teacher and himself. The first paragraph of the novel, then, shows Johnny as not being at home with the white teacher, even though he likes her, for the images of home and family enter into his mind rather than her words. He travels mentally "away" from the immediate context of the classroom rather than being a natural part of it.