LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature
Sample Student Midterm, Spring 2006

Roxane Richter

Minority Responses to Subordination:
Assimilation, Inequalitarian Pluralism & Resistance

The ethnic experience of blacks in America is as remarkable as it is unique: exceptional in its cultural and behavioral evolution, yet horrific in its historical experience and consequence.  Never before has a minority involuntarily entered the United States as an immigrant group and then suffered victimization for two centuries under slavery.  So their stories, their testimonies in their literature, are singularly noteworthy. Their sobering testimonies beg the ubiquitous question: Do we “fight or join” the enemy?

Throughout African American literature pieces like Song of Solomon, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and PUSH, you read firsthand accounts of the violent collision of secession, struggle and segregation right smack-dab alongside assimilation, acceptance and accord.  Vibrating throughout black American literature you feel the agitated, palpable pulse of a minority in unrest, jammed in a state of perpetual angst.  The vestiges of the black American community’s involuntary immigration and subsequent slavery have culminated culturally to create an “uninterrupted, if vacillating, conflict between whites and blacks throughout American history and the agonizing nature of the adjustment of blacks to a predominantly white society” (Marger, 258).              

            So it can be no surprise to readers to watch the characters of Pilate, Harriet Jacobs, Macon Dead, Guitar, Milkman and Precious struggle to resist and/or play white people’s “Aunt Jemima” games, and wavering, perhaps even daily, between the cultural macrocosms of hostility and unification.  

Reducing Boundaries: Assimilation

            Set in the 1960s, Song of Solomon deals with the issue of black assimilation into white middle class American society.  Assimilation can best be defined as a process of “boundary reduction that can occur when members of two or more cultural groups meet and can be seen on psychological, structural, biological and cultural dimensions,” according to Marger (pg. 107). 

Yet admittedly, any minority’s search for personal and communal dignity (via assimilation into the “American Dream”) can carry some “utopian” fallacies and inaccessible targets, much as Brendan Foley stated in a previous coursework submission.  And while Morrison does nod to the jumbled makeup and colossal myth of “chasing the America Dream,” she does seek to reclaim the (often denied) cultural and historical rights of African Americans in America. 

The patriarch of the Dead family, Macon Dead, proved to be a poignant archetype of a black man trying to grab hold of the “white man’s dream.” Like a horse with blinders, Macon boorishly blunders through life – ignoring family, friends or ethics – hell-bent on achieving some fiscal triumph as a victorious capitalist American.  “Let me tell you right now the one most important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things,” he tells his son, Milkman, “And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too…I’m going to teach you how” (pg. 55).  Macon’s father told him that “money is freedom,” and it’s the only freedom there is – so this could be a thorny holdover from slavery, when money, quite literally, bought a black person’s freedom. 

Macon was obsessed with money, the ownership of land, and upholding a socially acceptable familial and public façade.  But above all, he was preoccupied with owning “white only” possessions that were considered “off limits” to blacks.  For instance, every Sunday afternoon Macon drove his Packard through the wealthy white neighborhoods and he dreamed of owning a home in the prestigious and expensive “white only” area of town.   

Guitar had this to say to Milkman of his father, Macon, for chasing the white man’s “pot of gold”: ”But I don’t have to tell you that your father is a very strange Negro…He behaves like a white man, thinks like a white man…Now is that voluntary slavery or what?” He then accuses Pilate of the same “love of crackers” as Macon by saying, “She slipped into those Jemima shoes because they fit” (pg. 224). 

But today many African Americans reject the “ideal of assimilation” – the transcendence of group difference – and rather embrace a desire for an “alternative politics of difference through which African Americans can gain their fair share of power and increase their participation in social, political and economic American life without shedding their own self determined group cultural identity” (Rosenblum, pg. 352).  This new alternative is sometimes referred to as pluralism, which we will delve into next.

An Unequal Peace: Inequalitarian Pluralism

     Although many African Americans have reached some degree of cultural assimilation, many remain “excluded from significant participation in the dominant institutional structure” and seek to separate (either culturally, geographically, politically, or otherwise) themselves from the dominant group (Marger, 56-59).  This segregation (voluntary) or exclusion (involuntary) is referred to as pluralism, and can exist in a vacuum of unequal power and privilege, known as inequalitarian pluralism. 

The exclusion from equitable education, healthcare and security leads to the frustration that we see in Precious’ initial hatred of everyone who is white and her feeling “crackers is the cause for everything bad” (pg. 34).  In her world, they’ve only been the harbingers of bad news, discrimination and prejudice, as well as an ongoing source of exasperation and irritation.  But as she progresses toward greater (assimilation) success – becoming financially stable, literate and more secure – she realizes that whites, Jews, men and homosexuals do not constitute the  “enemy,” and that there are good and bad people in every race, color, gender and sexual orientation.     

Yet, early in the novel, when Farrakhan tells followers that the problem is “not crack but the cracker!” it appeals to Precious in that she can consign the puzzling wrongs of her life directly to someone – anyone – and whites made an easy target in her illiterate, uneducated home.  I think it afforded her some shred of explanation to her inexplicable suffering.

Unjust Balances of Power & Privilege

But its impossible to see the suffering of Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) as anything but forced bondage and servitude, so any cultural response to Harriet’s subordination was under a state of extreme duress.  But in her memoir, Harriet speaks of “an act of injustice” when her mistress died and she was sold at the age of 12.  So clearly she realizes her unjust and, later, inhumane treatment. She also speaks of her “stubborn disobedience” (pg. 474) and “distrust” of slave owners and traders (pg.477), so she is in some ways, resisting her enslavement, albeit in a passive and somewhat seditious manner. Unlike Guitar, she is does not take violent or aggressive step and her aim is not overthrow white people – she merely seeks to live as an unenslaved woman.           

            Hundreds of years later, in an uneasy twist, Pilate (in Song of Solomon) uses a kind of fake “slave persona” technique to woo white policemen with a bogus submissive ploy.  In a 360-degree character turnabout, Pilate spoke and acted like a subservient slave woman, whining, “Yes, massa’s” to the police so that they would release Milkman and Guitar from jail.  The next day, Milkman thought, “nothing was like the shame he felt as he watched and listened to Pilate. Not just her Aunt Jemima act, but the fact that she was both adept at it and willing to do it – for him” (pg. 209).  The sheer fact that Pilate would find her voluntary debasement and disgrace a useful and successful tool in dealing with the dominant culture is, in and of itself, a profound cultural testimony.   But, as a product of the subordinate minority group, Pilate knew that if she kowtowed and performed within the confines of the white officer’s cultural stereotype of a slave, she would “win” her cause by temporarily “losing” her dignity.                    

But there are many African Americans who would not, at any cost, humiliate themselves in order to achieve a goal and/or “succeed in the white man’s world,” and Toni Morrison’s rebellious Black Power militant, Guitar, is just such a man.  It’s his cause of violent resistance that we’ll look at now.      

Struggling Against the Enemy: Resistance & Confrontation 

Without hesitation, Guitar can easily be deemed the “poster child” of African American militant resistance within the framework of these three novels.  He neither wishes to unite nor withdraw from American society, but rather seeks to establish his minority group as the society’s dominant group.  He views white people as an enemy less than human – bereft of value and fully expendable.   

In Song of Solomon, Guitar explains to Milkman that he’s not killing people, but “white people” because there are “no innocent white people… and it takes a strong effort of the will to overcome an unnatural enemy” (pg. 155-156). With that, Milkman asks Guitar: “Why do you want to be like them? Don’t you want to be better than they are?” Guitar then says, “I am better” (pg. 157).  So in this dialogue, it’s clear that Guitar does not wish to assimilate nor adopt a duality, or pluralism, within the American culture – rather he’s interested in a militant uprising, placing his group, through violent means, in control. 

In the end, Guitar completely dismisses any attempts to assimilate into society:  “I don’t give a shit what white people know or even think” (pg. 160). He goes so far as to reject his last name; the name white people gave his ancestors, saying, “Guitar is my name. Bains is the slave master’s name…Slave names don’t bother me but slave status does” (pg.160).   

Conclusion      

In conclusion, no minority group lives strictly within the confines of a single, tidy vacuum-packed cultural model.  There are always fringe groups and splinter cells of an ethnic group that cause exceptions to any and every single-view ruling.  Even within a single character, like Precious, there can be multiple sightings of acts of assimilation, pluralism and resistance.  Plus, cultural responses can change over the evolution of a person’s lifetime (as we saw in the characters of Precious and Milkman), and can even transform with the number of years a subordinate minority lives under a dominant group’s control.    

But without a doubt, the African Americans’ response to subordination literally cries out to be heard from the pages of their works of literature.  The group’s societal exclusion and denial, followed by the ensuing confusion and switches between aversion and adoration, is eloquently and painfully portrayed in these three novels.         

  Bibliography

q       Marger, Martin. Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspectives, 2003, Michigan State University.

q       Rosenblum, Karen & Travis, Toni. The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex, Gender Social Class and Sexual Orientation, 2006, McGraw-Hill Publishing.