LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature
Sample Student Midterm, Fall 2007

Kathleen Walker-Anderson

September 30, 2007

Race and Class:  Decoding “The Color Code”

            In “’You Nothing But Trash’: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina,” J. Brooks Bouson discusses the “white trash phenomenon in America” in which ‘white trash’ has become “’a racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves…the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness” and a “derogatory class designation [emphasis added]” (101).  Within these observations is an example of how class is a repressed subject of American discourse.  The language of race, color, and class are combined to mark a group; in this case, a white group.  In her 2006 midterm “The Passing Trend of Color Lines,” Karen Daniel points out, “Regardless of the technicality of race existing, physiologically there is little doubt that race and color certainly exist in a cultural and social way, and it is the cultural and social aspects of race that most impact our lives, our identities, and subsequently, our opportunities in life (objective 2b).”  The fact that lives, identities, and opportunities are impacted by race and color is a complicated issue to examine; and all these italicized terms are related by what is in one way an economic issue, in another a social and cultural issue, and yet also a political issue. Race replaces class so often it is difficult to decipher the presence of the language of race and/or the language of class.  The repression of class in American discourse is expressed by decoding the various representations of “The Color Code” in the process of looking at the language of race and class in The Classic Slave Narratives, Song of Solomon, and Bastard Out of Carolina.

To discuss how “The Color Code” is related to the repression of class it is appropriate to use the concept of “binary oppositions” defined by The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms as “a concept [developed by Jacques Derrida] to suggest that people in Western culture tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of contrary pairs… [that] are not simply oppositions but also valuative hierarchies” (39).  The imposition of positive and negative qualities according to skin color can be looked at as “binary oppositions” imposed by the history of American slavery.  Contrary pairs such as white and black, light and dark, good and evil, superior and inferior are “oppositions” but also “valuative hierarchies” that have resulted in “stigmatization” associated with skin color:

A social phenomenon, stigmatization, as Rosemarie Thomson explains, is “an interactive social process in which particular human traits are deemed not only different, but deviant.”  Reflecting the “tastes and opinions of the dominant group,” stigmatization “reinforces that group’s idealized self-description as neutral, normal, legitimate, and identifiable by denigrating the characteristics of less powerful groups or those considered alien (31; see also Coleman).  (Bouson 104)     

The Classic Slave Narratives demonstrate how “derogatory class designations” are rooted in the experience of American slavery that served as a foundation for defining the characteristics of “the inferior, degenerate, and socially stigmatized Other” (Bouson 105).  In “The Life of Gustavus Vassa” Olaudah Equiano explains, “in regard to complexion, ideas of beauty are wholly relative.  I remember while in Africa to have seen three negro children, who were tawny, and another quite white, who were universally regarded as deformed by myself and the natives in general, as far as related to their complexions” (37).  The deformity, or negative quality, in this case is the lightness of complexion, not the stigmata of blackness.  In his native province of Essaka, white is unnatural and black is natural, but this pairing did not come to be defined in this particular type of  “valuative hierarchy” until after his experience with the European slave trade and American slavery in Virginia.  Slavery was present in Equiano’s “kingdom of Benin” in Africa, but he “had never heard of white men or Europeans” (31).  Equiano’s awareness of complexion did not come from slavery alone; in his native country slavery was not based on race nor on a class structure such as the European aristocracy, middle class bourgeois, and lower class peasants and laborers.  The slaves of the Eboe, according to Equiano, were often taken as “prisoners or booty” (38), but “with us they do no more work than other members of the community” (39). 

The class structure that came to predominate the south was an ‘acceptable’ form of free labor, a lower class of black slaves, and a higher class of plantation owners; while in the north the Industrial Revolution created a working class of cheap immigrant labor, yet kept the Plantations of the south in the business of slavery with a demand for raw material, cotton.          

The tendency to explain human traits in terms of binary oppositions is one reason that race is able to replace class.  The binary opposition of North and South is not static; it bounces back and forth between positive/negative qualities as neither is located at one end or the other.  The terms are intertwined, as the history of the North and South is intertwined, one could not exist without the other.  What came to represent “derogatory class designations,” the binary oppositions of white is good, black is evil, were created in the South by the existence of a lower class of black slaves.  The necessity to make black evil, deformed, and uncivilized was to excuse the contradiction created by the Declaration of Independence when it declared that all human beings have rights.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  The imposition of negative human traits on the black color of skin crossed over into a “tainted” class of people who were once lumped together as ignorant slaves; then with emancipation and the spread of industrialization, it became necessary to use another term, an economic term or “working class.”  The imposed ‘characteristics’ of slaves are eventually imposed on an economic group; the difficulty in deciphering the difference between race and class is that there are no binary oppositions set in stone.  They are fluctuating as they are reversed or one blends into the other all the time. 

Seeing a white man flogged Equiano explains, “the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty:  and this not only shewn towards us blacks, but also to some of the whites themselves” (58).  The reason Equiano found the white people so unnatural and “thought they were spirits” (59) was that the hierarchy of slavery was based on the hierarchy of class in the European and American sense.  The sense of superiority is initially tied to superiority of class, not race; that is why the white people beat a white man to death, “and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute.  This made me fear these people the more” (Equiano 59).  His fear turns to realization as the language of class is used to defile the inequality imposed by slavery.  “Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and gain [emphasis added]” (63)?  Luxury and gain are terms associated with class, where a lower class of people works for the gain of a wealthier class of people; yet before emancipation this lower class of free labor, producing even more luxury and gain, physiologically possessed dark skin.  Skin color became a means of designating an ‘uncivilized’ class of people who were kept ‘uncivilized’ and oppressed with the superior class’s complete awareness of that oppression.

In “The Life of Frederick Douglass,” Mr. Auld’s response to his wife teaching a slave to read is an example of the awareness of the ‘superior’ class to its oppression of black slaves.  “’If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell.  A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master…if you teach that nigger…how to read, there would be no keeping him…He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master’” (Douglass 364).  The slave ceases to have any value if he has the ability to have his own voice.  If the inferior class has a voice, the superior class cannot impose the “tastes and opinions of the dominant group,” unless “particular human traits are deemed not only different, but deviant” (Bouson 104).  Black becomes a way to label a class of people “as uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean” just as the same deviant human traits are used to label “white trash identity” (Bouson 106). 

Frederick Douglass finds out he is going to Baltimore and will receive “a pair of trousers,” so he is told he must get clean.  “The thought of owning a pair of trousers was great indeed!  It was almost a sufficient motive, not only to make me take off what would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin itself [emphasis added]” (360).  Never having a pair of trousers is an economic issue; the reason the white children in Baltimore share their knowledge with him in exchange for bread is their economic class designation as “hungry little urchins” (368).  The desire to “take off…the skin itself” is a created inferiority of color due to Douglass’s experience of being a slave; and the imposed binary oppositions of white/black and superior/inferior.  The economic position of the white children and Douglass are the same.  He even says in regard to having access to bread all the time, “I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood” (368).  The white children may be free, but the idea of freedom is “wholly relative,” especially when economic slavery crosses the color line; and “The Color Code” of binary oppositions, such as white/black, clean/unclean, civilized/uncivilized, is either reversed or the “contrary pairs” are so intertwined they are only distinguishable in the language of class.     

The reversal of “The Color Code” white is natural and black is unnatural is seen in The Life of Gustavus Vassa, when he speaks of how the “tawny” or “white” children “were universally regarded as deformed” (Equiano 37).  The representation of “The Color Code” as white is unnatural and black is natural is also present in Bastard Out of Carolina and Song of Solomon, yet it is necessary to examine how class is tied into this reversal.  In Bastard Out of Carolina, Bone Boatwright is the dark-headed, black-eyed “bastard” daughter of Anney Boatwright.  The “notorious, dangerous, and jail-bound” Boatwrights are a “white trash” family characterized as “No-good, lazy, shiftless” (Allison 3).  Anney resists the label, and having “Illegitimate” stamped across Bone’s birth certificate is a personal mark against her, a stigmatization.  “Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she’d ever spent bent over other people’s peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground.  The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they’d tried to put on her” (3).  The stamp, the stigmatization of white trash “as uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean” is an economic designation of the poor, working class who physiologically possess white skin. 

The introduction of white as unnatural in Bastard Out of Carolina is Bone’s friendship with Shannon Pearl, a middle class albino.  The reversal of “The Color Code” is done through the literal use of color, a trait the character possesses through actual appearance.  Shannon Pearl is an unnaturally white little girl who is not accepted by her own people because she is an “inferior, degenerate, and socially stigmatized Other” due to her deformity (Bouson 105).  Her deformity is a result of what Equiano referred to when he said that “ideas of beauty are wholly relative” (37).  She is ugly because she is unnatural, but too much whiteness is unnatural only because the binary opposition of white is natural, black is unnatural was established in the first place.  The only way to be literally too white, is if the acceptable form of whiteness only exists in the dominant group.  In this case, the dominant group is the white middle class, and not even Bone’s white skin or Shannon’s middle class status can help either of them.  They are still “alien,” Bone because of her working class status and Shannon because of the color of her skin.  When the Greenville County Courthouse burns down, Anney believes it means that Bone has a chance without “Illegitimate” stamped across her birth certificate, but despite the political decree that “all men are created equal” the social stigmatization remains. 

The representation of white as unnatural is also seen in Bone’s stepfather.  Bone is physically and sexually abused by her stepfather Glen Waddell, the “black sheep” of the middle class Waddell family.  Though Glen desires to “marry Black Earle’s baby sister, marry the whole Boatwright legend, shame his daddy and shock his brothers,” eventually his inability to maintain the middle class status he is used to leads to an unnatural obsession with Bone (Allison 12,13).  He becomes an unnatural white man who beats, molests, and eventually rapes one of his own, his stepdaughter Bone.  The unnatural white man is the product of a class structure.  Just as Equiano noted that “the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner… also to some of the whites themselves” (59), Glen Waddell turns on his own due to his sense of superiority of class though he is unable to escape what he believes is the inferior working class.  After Anney miscarries their son, “Glen had wanted a plot of his own but had no money to buy one, and that seemed to be the thing that finally broke his grief and turned it to rage” (Allison 49). 

Glen’s middle class family does not accept him and his marriage to a Boatwright leaves him with the same ‘stamp’ that Anney and Bone carry, “No-good, lazy, shiftless,” but unlike the Boatwrights whose working class status preceded their “uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean” reputation, Glen Waddell comes from a middle class background whose unnatural characteristics have nothing to do with being part of the working class.  The unnatural white man that was created by the superiority of class disguised as superiority of race is directly addressed by Guitar Bains in Song of Solomon.  After explaining the mission of “The Seven Days…to keep things on an even keel” by enacting an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth notion of revenge, Guitar explains:

“’There are no innocent white people…Hitler’s the most natural white man in the world.  He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn’t have us…Every time somebody does a thing like that to one of us, they say the people who did it were crazy or ignorant…how come Negroes, the craziest, most ignorant people in America, don’t get that crazy and that ignorant?  No.  White people are unnatural.’” (Morrison 155-156)

The binary oppositions of white/black, educated/ignorant, civilized/uncivilized that were created by the existence of slavery are evident in Guitar’s words when he refers to “Negroes, the…most ignorant people in America.”  This ‘ignorance’ is a result of the oppression of black people by ‘unnatural white people’.  The white people became unnatural, savage, and deformed as a result of the quest for luxury and gain, the capitalist hierarchy of profit over people. 

In The Life of Frederick Douglass, he expresses what leads his once-kind mistress to treat him badly.  “She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living” (363).  Having worked for a living, instead of always having slave labor to do the work for her, Mrs. Auld initially had a notion of equality among human beings.  “I was utterly astonished at her goodness…She was entirely unlike any other white woman I had ever seen” (363).  What set her apart was an economic equality that ceased to exist once she married into a higher class and discovered “the fatal poison of irresponsible power” through her husband’s explanation of the necessity to keep black slaves ‘ignorant’ and ‘of value’ to their masters.  Slavery turned people into property and profit, so the same process that created the binary oppositions of white/black, natural/unnatural also acts as a hierarchy of profit over people.  Once Mrs. Auld is made aware of this hierarchy of color and class, she “soon became red with rage” (364).

Because of the class structure in America, slaves became part of the working class, contributing to the defining “deviant” characteristics of that class as determined by the dominant group.  In Song of Solomon Macon Dead is a middle class black man.  His status in the middle class is complicated by his race.  His middle class identity is that of a man who lives by the hierarchy of profit above people.  Mrs. Bains, Guitar’s grandmother, comes to his office to request an extension on the rent but he doesn’t even give her the chance to ask, nor does he remember her as a person.  “Macon Dead remembered—not the woman, but the circumstances at number three.  His tenant’s grandmother or aunt or something had moved in there and the rent was long overdue” (Morrison 21).  He does not have any real concern or interest for the “circumstances” except for the circumstance of the rent.  After the meeting, leaving with no understanding or help from Macon, she says, “’A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see.  A terrible, terrible thing’” (22).  It is terrible because by taking on the dominant group’s quest of luxury and gain where “the business of life…was learning to own things,” he also becomes part of the oppression (69).  By turning away from his own people and his past he reinforces “The Color Code” of binary oppositions established by slavery.  In fact, it is not Macon Dead’s middle class status that keeps Guitar and Milkman out of jail, but Pilate’s willingness to play the “uncultured, uncivilized, and unclean” role, or what Milkman refers to as her “Aunt Jemima act” (Morrison 209).  Pilate’s awareness of the stigmatization of black people is what makes her blackness natural, and Macon Dead’s middle class status artificial because of his willingness to accept the binary oppositions of white is natural, black is unnatural by imitating the qualities of the dominant group.  Pilate was only playing a role, while Macon Dead believed the white policemen treated him as an equal as he told Milkman later, “They know me.  You saw how they acted when I got there” (204).  The same incident that made Milkman realize Pilate’s awareness of stigmatization made Guitar’s rage begin to surface as his working class experience was quite different from Milkman’s middle class upbringing. 

Though Glen Waddell is savage, brutal, and cruel, and fits Guitar’s description of an unnatural white man; what causes Guitar’s “rage” and leads him to an obsession that turns him against one of his own, Milkman, is similar to what causes Glen’s “rage.”  Milkman knew Pilate was playing a role because she had to in order to save him, but Guitar’s perception of Pilate’s behavior was different.  After telling Milkman that Macon Dead “behaves like a white man, thinks like a white man,” he then says, “And Pilate.  She’s worse…She slipped into those Jemima shoes cause they fit” (223-224).  He reacts with rage to Pilate’s behavior because of his particular working class experience.  After his father is “sliced in half and boxed backward” at the sawmill, his mother “had smiled and shown that willingness to love the man who was responsible for dividing his father up throughout eternity” (224). 

Guitar’s rage which manifests in his revenge against the unnatural white people is due to his working class experience.  Where Milkman found freedom, Guitar became trapped by his own rage.  Milkman had the luxury of money that spared him from the experiences of Guitar:  his father killed in a sawmill with no real concern or compensation from the white foreman for his death, his mother ran off because she couldn’t handle it, he was homeless after Macon Dead kicked his grandmother out of “number three.”  The gold that initially leads Milkman on his journey south becomes a catalyst for his own understanding that black is natural through the knowledge of the existence of his great-grandfather Solomon; in turn, the gold becomes an obsession for Guitar that leads him to turn on his own in the end despite his conviction that white is unnatural and black is natural, just as Glen Waddell’s obsession with his class status leads him to turn on his own despite the ‘accepted’ notion that white is natural and black is unnatural. 

As expressed in Bastard Out of Carolina white skin alone cannot save people from economic slavery where “deviant human traits” are imposed on a group primarily because of their economic status, thus “white trash” becomes a class designation disguised in the language of race; a “racial epithet...that marks certain whites as a…dysgenic race” (Bouson 101).  The abuse Bone suffers at the hands of Glen Waddell goes on for years, but Bone finds strength in stories, especially the stories that Granny tells about her great-great grandfather.

My granddaddy…he was a Cherokee, and he didn’t much like us, all his towheaded grand-children…Quiet man, too.  Wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t barely talk.  Not a Boatwright, that’s for sure…Would have killed to win his attention even one more minute than we got, and near died to be any way more like him, though we were as different from him as children can be. None of us quiet, all of us fighters…and no one but you got that blue-black hair.  Lord, you were a strange thing! (Allison 26-27)

When Bone tells Uncle Earle this story, he laughs and tells her, ”'You’re a Boatwright, Bone, even if you are the strangest child we got'” (27).  Bone asks her Aunt Alma about her real father and Alma tells her that he came to see her once, and while he held her, “You just looked at him with your black Indian eyes like he wasn’t nothing but a servant, lifting you up for some air or something” (25).  Bone’s strangeness, or otherness, is tied to her ‘blackness’, yet it is also the concept that black is natural.  It is in her ‘otherness’ that Bone finds strength and also the ability to see that race replaces class. 

            After Alma leaves her husband and moves into an apartment, Bone and her cousins encounter an African-American family.  Her cousin Grey responds to the encounter with a sense of racial superiority.  “’Niggers,’ Grey whispered proudly.  ‘Scared of us’” (83).  Bone’s response to Grey and her first encounter with “colored people” was to notice beauty and similarities she shared with these ‘Other’ children.  “The cheekbones were as high as mine, the eyes large and delicate with long lashes…The chocolate skin was so smooth, so polished, the pores invisible.  I put my fingers to my own cheeks, looked over at Grey…[his] cheeks were pitted with blackheads and flushed with sunburn.  I’d never thought about it before, but he was almost ugly” (84).  Equiano’s decree that “beauty is wholly relative” again finds itself tied to race and class.  Grey is ugly, but feels superior because of his white skin; Bone is dark and strange, but realizes that superiority based on race is unnatural as she sees a black child is naturally more beautiful than her white cousin.  All of the children are of the same working class status, but their lives, identities, and opportunities are perceived to be determined by color.  Grey feels superior to the black children though economically they are equal; Bone connects with the black children because she understands that the feeling of ‘otherness’ is socially imposed.

            Milkman, like Bone, is marked by ‘otherness’ within is own family and community.  Just as the dark-headed, black-eyed Bone did not fit into her “towheaded” Boatwright family, Milkman is called “’peculiar’…’deep’…even mysterious” because of his sadness surrounding his inability to fly.  His ‘otherness’ turns to strength when what began as a search for gold leads Milkman to the knowledge that his great-grandfather was Solomon, a flying African.  Both Bone and Milkman realize that the binary oppositions created by slavery are socially imposed, and find themselves drawn to their dark heritage despite their racial or class status.  The binary oppositions of “The Color Code” are either reversed or intertwined throughout The Classic Slave Narratives, Bastard Out of Carolina, and Song of Solomon.  The decree that “white people are unnatural” is applicable because of the oppression of people across the color line that was always tied to a sense of superiority of class though it became complicated by race because of the existence of slavery.  Profit over people is unnatural, and it was in the quest for luxury and gain that the need to stigmatize people became necessary to keep “reflecting the ‘tastes and opinions of the dominant group’” (Bouson 104).  When Amiri Baraka asks “Who?” in “Somebody Blew up America” the answer is not simple.  Race and class collide throughout the poem, yet in the end it is “the dominant group” that determines how Who is defined. 

            Who make money from war

            Who make dough from fear and lies

            Who want the world like it is

            Who want the world to be ruled by

            imperialism and national

            oppression and terror violence, and

            hunger and poverty.           

Additional Works Cited

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 1993.

Bouson , J. Brooks. "“You Nothing But Trash”: White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina.." Southern Literary Journal 34(2001): 101-123.