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 70’s and 80’s. Her mother is a white, blueblood Bostonian woman turned political activist, and her father is a black Boston University professor with radical ideas about race. Birdie and her older sister Cole are both bi-racial children, but Cole looks more black and Birdie looks more white. The two sisters are separated early in the novel and then the rest of the story focuses on Birdie and how she needs to â€Å"pass† as white. Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of social groups other than his or her own, such as a different race, ethnicity, social class, or gender, generally with the purpose of gaining social acceptance. Birdie’s existence is the ultimate experiment on how to pass. She is first asked to pass as black at Nkrumah, even though she doesn’t fit the profile of a black child. Then she is taken to New Hampshire and asked to be the opposite of what she’d been before- a white Jewish girl. Senna introduces Birdie to all different versions of the races she is torn between, and none of them seem to fit quite right. Through Birdie, Senna is making 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 means to be black while she’s younger, even though the general idea of the time was very specific. All of the adults around her are busy preaching this idea of The Black Person, but they are showing her all different versions of what that really means. The first impression she gets of a black person is her father who â€Å"in the past year had discovered Black Pride and†¦ was trying to purge himself of his ‘honkified past’†(10). Deck is an intellectual; he studied at Harvard and is a professor at Boston University. However by the time his daughters are old enough to really start understanding things, he has gotten caught up in the idea of The Black Person, saying things about his sister like â€Å"she sleeps with these white boys, then acts surprised when they don’t take her home for dinner. I told her, these ofays just want their thirty minutes of difference†(10). He’s telling his daughters that the way to truly be black is to have no association with white people, which is a direct contradiction of his own life and something that is impossible for them to do given their genealogy. He’s telling them there’s no way for them to be the ideological black person. Then the girls go to Nkrumah, a black power school. This school is supposed to be about owning your race and being proud of being black, but Birdie isn’t initially accepted well because she’s not ‘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 magazine, speaks in a specific slang, dresses differently and does her hair in a braid to hide it’s smoothness. At Nkrumah, she tries to live as though she doesn’t have a white mother. However, that’s not who she is. She says that she â€Å"learned the art of changing at Nkrumah, a skill that would later become second nature†(62). She’s acknowledging here that this all black persona isn’t who she is. She’s simply changing, pretending. 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 information 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 mother’s boyfriend Jim. Jim is the type of white man who likes to act like he’s liberal until it comes down to real world circumstances. After causing a scene with some young black men, Jim says â€Å"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? We’re on their side and they don’t even know it† (265). Jim is the white man who sees his liberality as a gift instead of a belief. Birdie says about this that â€Å"it scared me a little†¦. 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, Sandy is a white person who firmly believes in equality, even if she may take it to extremes. She tells her daughters â€Å"that politics weren’t complicated. They were simple. People, she 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 doesn’t 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 it’s because â€Å"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 much as she’d like to say she’s acting, she assimilates to this culture just like she did the black culture at Nkrumah; â€Å"I was a New Hampshire girl now†¦we dressed identically: cutoff jean short, halter 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 didn’t really want to. The only thing that shocks her out of the comfort she’s fallen into in this identity is the fact that another half black girl recognizes that she’s not fully white; â€Å"I’m 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 that’s not the only part of who she is. She also cannot be fully black, not only because she has light skin but also because that’s not the only part of her heritage that exists. Birdie is the perfect example of how multidimensional race is. There is no one way to be black and there is no one way to be white. Race isn’t one size fits all.