Keeping up with the Joneses: The naming of racial identities in the autobiographical writings of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Lisa Jones

Lisa, writing in a more playfully cynical postmodern era, opens up further names and further naming questions for race and gender in the U.S. In the year 2000 (she writes), a new option could appear on the census form: the category "multiracial." Among Lisa's problems with the "multiracial" census category movement (or, as she calls it, "biracial nationalism"), is her sense that

Beyond the children's self-esteem issue, the movement's larger agenda and philosophical goals registered blurry. Race is configured as choice, as a category on a school form. Race is not seen as a political/economic construct, a battleground where Americans vie for power and turf, but a question of color, a stick-on, peel-off label. (Jones 1994, 57)

For Lisa, race is much less a question of individual identity choice than it is a "political/economic construct" with a very long history. For her, the question is, "Are there ways to be responsible to a history that we are indebted to without being imprisoned by it?" (60). Part of the larger answer to this rhetorical question is to shift the issue from racial identity to institutional racism. She points out that "[p]eople of color, whether they call themselves biracial, Swirls . .. or zebra Americans, are disproportionately members of America's underclass" (58). Racial identity is never just a question of andividual identity, but of socioeconomic history that we cannot just choose to opt out of. She suggests that, in naming ourselves, we "balance individual identity with a responsibility to and critical eye on history" (65). Introducing her own "name" to her readers, she says:

I hail from the Afro-rainbow tribe. Papa's black by way of Newark and South Carolina. Mom's Jewish by way of Brooklyn and Eastern Europe. Ethnically I'm African American. Politically I'm a person of color. My resume: Womanist-theater producing circa the eighties; day jobbing at an alternative newspaper, looking to define the role of race woman in the multiculti nineties. (Jones 1994, 54)

Lisa is not offering an identity beyond category names; she's not positing a utopic world of identity "beyond" race. Rather, in introducing her name, Lisa offers multiple racial identities, multiple "discursive repertoires." Racial identity is always multiple, for Lisa, not only because we all come ultimately from racially mixed lineage, not only because we hail from a culture (American) that is inherently multicultural, but also because we need to occupy and claim different racial identities in different public and private realms. Our political racial identities may well not match our ethnic racial identities, or our family racial identities, or our occupational racial identities. Lisa's naming activities, then presage a further shift in African-American racial identity in the 1990s and beyond: a shift of focus from racial identity per se to racial identification, and even a shift of interest from racial identity to community.