Danzy Sennas Caucasia Essay -- Danzy Senna Caucasia Essays

Danzy Sennas CaucasiaIn Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, Birdie spends term in several different racial contexts and, in each one, adjusts the racial definition of herself. Through this process, she discovers much to the highest degree the conception of race in contemporary American society and achieves the nuanced understanding that race, while merely a construction, is still (operationally) real. This is contrasted by the more dangerous, oversimplified understanding of race that races are biologic rivals, inherently different and unable to coexist without some sort of origin structure embodied by the character of Redbone, who is also a sign of inauthenticity. This latter reflexion of Redbone shows the emptiness inherent in the views he holds about race, an important reason for his inclusion in the unexampled.Redbone, which, interestingly enough, according to urbandictionary.com literally tights a light-skinned opprobrious person with kinky cerise hair, is an incredibly outspok en advocate of the revolution (the movement intended to have Blacks to overthrow Whites in the American power-structure) and the need to use violence to experience it about. In the scene where Redbone shows Birdie the guns, he says, This little girl personalt no security risk, brotha. We gotta raise our children to know how to fight (Senna 15). He also tells Deck that maybe he needs to get his passport out of them books and put some action behind them high-falutin theories of his (16). This manifestation of black vs. white politics as unabashed advocating of violence and this mockery and minimize of intellectualism as high-falutin in favor of insufficiently thought-out action shows just how liquid and oversimplified Redbones views of race are. They are of the good vs. the ... ...cted but that that doesnt mean it doesnt exist that Birdie and her sister express toward the end of the novel upon their reunification (408). Through embodying both falseness and such a self-seeking and facile view of race, Redbone serves as Sennas symbol that they go pass around in hand, that is, that such conceptions are empty and inauthentic not professedly to the way the land actually works. As we begin to interrogative sentence who Redbone is, we doubt what he says. Taking this a step further, the sense of inauthenticity associated with him points out the aspect of lying to oneself that is necessary for maintaining these self-serving definitions of race. As Redbone pretends to be something hes not and the flasher denigrates others for an inauthentic sense of power, the racist lies to himself about how the world really is to maintain his image of himself, and his race, on top of it.