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Keeping up with the Joneses: The naming of racial identities in the autobiographical writings of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Lisa Jones
College Literature, Winter 2002 by Thompson, Deborah
Lisa checks "black" on the census form, and will choose "black" over "multiracial" or "biracial" if given the option, not because she always identifies as singularly black, but because in the local instance of the census form, with its deeply political and economic purposes, she chooses to be identified in an identity that had been historically chosen for her. Lisa sees that she cannot opt out of the system of naming, nor can she accept it; so instead, she does both. She both takes the label "black," operating within the system of racial naming, and rejects the system of racial naming itself. Lisa Jones recognizes Ruth Frankenberg's characterization of the social script of racial identity as a "tension between agency and innovation on the one hand and the 'givenness' of a universe of discourse on the other," so that one's racial identities are "chosen but by no means freely so." Or, in Butlerian terms, linguistic agency is inherently ambivalent, since "the one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset" (Butler 1997, 16). Lisa recognizes, as she checks her census form and as she constructs and claims her various racial identities, that the act of racial naming enmeshes the subject in a dialectic of "enabling constraints," of active engagement with and subjection to predetermined socioeconomic and linguistic constructs.We are indebted to history but not imprisoned by it. In her project of"looking to define the role of race woman in the multiculti nineties," Lisa sees that we need both to insist on the historical racial categories (particularly "black") so deeply embedded in American economic structures, and to demystify them.
Likewise, Lisa repeatedly calls her mother, Hettie, "white"-but written in the form of "my (white) mother" (Jones 1994, 29, 31). The parentheses indicate that the term "white" is both marked and unmarked, both necessary and supplementary, both accurate and there only for lack of a better term. And the process of configuring new racial identities in America involves, for Lisa, not a proliferation of new racial categories (such as "biracial" or "multiracial"), but the active engagement in a dynamic dialectic of insisting on and erasing, of marking and displacing, historically powerful racial names. Butler, at her most visionary in Excitable Speech, suggests that
as we think about worlds that might one day become thinkable, sayable, legible, the opening up of the foreclosed and the saying of the unspeakable become part of the very "offense" that must be committed in order to expand the domain of linguistic survival. The resigni-fication of speech requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms. (Butler 1993, 41)
The Joneses, I've been arguing, provide concrete examples of "expand[ing] the domain of linguistic survival" and of"producing legitimation in new and future forms."
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