Black People and Birdie Essay

In her novel Caucasia, Danzy Senna paints the image of a young bi-racial girl, Birdie, growing up in the 70s and 80s. Her induce is a lily- discolor, blueblood Bostonian woman saturnine political act uponivist, and her father is a lightlessness Boston University professor with root word ideas somewhat race. Birdie and her older sister Cole are twain bi-racial children, but Cole looks more nigrify and Birdie looks more dust coat. The dickens sisters are separated early in the novel and then the emit of the story focuses on Birdie and how she needs to pass as vacuous. termination is the ability of a someone to be regarded as a instalment of social groups other than his or her own, such as a distinct race, ethnicity, social class, or gender, glob whole(a)y with the purpose of gaining social acceptance. Birdies existence is the ultimate experiment on how to pass. She is first asked to pass as black at Nkrumah, stock-still though she doesnt sum up the compose of a blac k child. Then she is taken to modern Hampshire and asked to be the opponent of what shed been before- a white Jewish girl.Senna introduces Birdie to all line of descenting strains of the races she is torn between, and none of them seem to fit quite right. Through Birdie, Senna is fashioning the point we see that there is no one size fits all version of any race. Birdie is exposed to many different ideas of what it marrow to be black while shes younger, even though the general idea of the time was very specific. All of the adults around her are take preaching this idea of The Black Person, but they are showing her all different versions of what that rattling means.The first impression she gets of a black person is her father who in the past year had discovered Black congratulate and was trying to purge himself of his honkified past(10). Deck is an intellectual he canvas at Harvard and is a professor at Boston University. However by the time his daughters are old enough to really start dread things, he has gotten caught up in the idea of The Black Person, utter things ab emerge his sister same(p) she sleeps with these white boys, then acts surprised when they dont take her home for dinner.I told her, these ofays beneficial want their thirty legal proceeding of difference(10). Hes telling his daughters that the way to truly be black is to have no association with white people, which is a channelize contradiction of his own life and something that is impossible for them to do given their genealogy. Hes telling them theres no way for them to be the ideological black person. Then the girls go to Nkrumah, a black effect tutor. This school is supposed to be about owning your race and being imperial of being black, but Birdie isnt initially veritable well up because shes non black enough.The way she becomes more accepted is through her sister, but also because she assimilates to the idea of black culture that her school has. She reads Ebony maga zine, speaks in a specific slang, dresses differently and does her hair in a braid to hide its smoothness. At Nkrumah, she tries to live as though she doesnt have a white become. However, thats not who she is. She says that she learned the art of changing at Nkrumah, a skill that would subsequent become second nature(62). Shes acknowledging here that this all black persona isnt who she is.Shes simply changing, feigning. Pretending is what Birdie has to do for most of this book, but as she gets older instead of needing to pass as black, she needs to instead adopt a new identity as Jesse Goldman, a Jewish white girl. She maintains in her mind that she is black, and is just pretending with her white half. While using this persona, and having the mindset that she is just gathering culture on whiteness, Birdie gets painted a picture of different types of white people.In an authoritative sense, Birdie gets ideas about being white from her mother and her mothers boyfriend Jim. Jim is t he type of white man who likes to act like hes liberal until it comes down to real manhood circumstances. After causing a scene with some young black men, Jim says I swear, I try to be liberal. I try really, really hard. But when you meet fucking punks like that, you start to wonder. I mean, Jesus, what did we do to deserve that? Were on their side and they dont even know it (265).Jim is the white man who sees his liberality as a submit instead of a belief. Birdie says about this that it scared me a superficial. how easily they could become cowering white folks, nothing more, nothing less (264). To contrast these this very negative views of what it means to be white, Birdie also has her mother as a model. Despite coming from an upper class, white family and the struggles that she has with that, blonde is a white person who firmly believes in equality, even if she whitethorn take it to extremes.She tells her daughters that politics werent complicated. They were simple. People, sh e said, deserved four basic things food, love, shelter, and a good education (22). This is the opposite from what Birdie has seen in other white people. Her mother doesnt revert to racism or abandon her views when it comes time for her to uphold them. Finally, Birdie befriends the most racist girls in school saying its because there was a safety in this pantomime. The less she behaved like herself, the more she could believe that this was still a game(233).However, as a good deal as shed like to say shes acting, she assimilates to this culture just like she did the black culture at Nkrumah I was a New Hampshire girl nowwe dressed identically cutoff jean short, throttle tops that exposed our tan bellies, and jelly shoes on our feet (244-245). This version of being white was a skin Birdie could slide on easily, even if she didnt really want to. The only thing that shocks her out of the comfort shes fallen into in this identity is the fact that another(prenominal) half black girl rec ognizes that shes not in full white Im black, like you (286).None of these ideas about race fit Birdie. She cannot exactly fit into a version of what it means to be white because thats not the only part of who she is. She also cannot be fully black, not only because she has light skin but also because thats not the only part of her heritage that exists. Birdie is the perfect casing of how multidimensional race is. There is no one way to be black and there is no one way to be white. flow isnt one size fits all.