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

Skin.

Later that afternoon, tired, I found myself alone on a dirt road.The heat was oppressive, the fan I was carrying cut into my hand .... Out of some tall grass at the roadside a little black girl appeared, seven or eight years old, barefoot, dressed in a cotton smock. She waited as I approached and then asked, pointing to the fan, "What are you doing with that?"

"I'm selling them," I said.

"Oh, come to my house," she said dramatically, and with that thrust her hand into mine. I looked down. I'd never held a black person's hand. It was dry, dusty, sweet, and so fragile, and dark as I was from that southern sun it wasn't that different from mine. Skin, I thought, remembering Linda. James 1990, 14)

Here, Hettie sees race only as skin, an epidermal phenomenon. Even up to this moment, young Hettie seemingly has no vocabulary, no "discursive repertoires," no names for racial identity, whether black or white, or for racial difference. And this absence of names makes different racial identities seem mysterious, exotic, sensual, and unspeakably taboo-and makes white identity at once hegemonic and invisible.

On the other hand, other ways of being white-or sub-races of the "white race"-are operative and noted in the above passage. The "hillbilly" identity is both characterized as more racist than a northern, urban white identity and is subjected unapologetically to a kind of racist casting by northern, urban whites. Even the 1990 Hettie, writing retrospectively, uses a term like "hillbilly" as a self-evident category, a category as (un)marked by class distinctions as "black," "brown," and "yellow" are clearly marked by caste distinctions for LeRoi.

The 1950s and 1960s were not only a period of elaborate naming distinctions among Americans of African descent, but also a period of rapid diachronic identity changes and concomitant name changes-most notably, from "colored" to "Negro" to "black" to "Afro-American" to "African-- American." The diachronic and synchronic name changes are related to each other, and to larger shifts in America. These terminological shifts are not simply name changes, but changes in historical moment, cultural identity, and concomitant aesthetic style and content.5 LeRoi makes firm distinctions, in the 1960s and 1970s, between "black art," "Negro art," and "Colored Theater." The latter is for him the least progressive/radical, the most likely to assuage white guilt:

Later, after the word "black" had cooled out some and the idea of even "black art" had sunk roots deep enough in the black masses, where it could not simply be denied out of existence, the powers-that-be brought in some Negro art, some skin theater, eliminating the most progressive and revolutionary expressions for a fundable colored theater that merely treaded on "the black experience," rather than carrying on the black struggle for democracy and self-determination. Then the Fords and Rockefellers "fount" them some colored folks they could trust and dropped some dough on them for colored theater. Douglas Turner Ward's Negro Ensemble is perhaps the most famous case in point. During a period when the average young blood would go to your head for calling him or her a knee-grow, the Fords and Rockefellers could raise themselves up a whole-ass knee-- grow ensemble. But that's part of the formula: Deny reality as long as you have to and then, when backed up against the wall, substitute an ersatz model filled with the standard white racist lies which include some dressed as Negro art. Instead of black art, bring in Negro art, house nigger art, and celebrate slavery, right on! (Baraka 1984, 214-15)