Essay about Caucasia written by Danzy Senna - 1336 Words

Although society advocates believing in a ‘sameness’ between people who are black or white, individuals are still organized by race, class, gender and sexuality into social hierarchies. These hierarchies essentially formulate stigmas that suppress certain races and discriminate against them. Caucasia written by Danzy Senna is focused around a young mixed girl, Birdie, who encounters obstacles in her life that help her form her own perceptions about issues regarding class, race, and sexuality. These obstacles fundamentally shape her to have a unique outlook on society where she begins to question white privilege and also sympathize towards the mistreatment of black individuals. Senna explores the fundamental problems that are associated†¦show more content†¦When Birdie and her sister are sent to Nkrumah, Birdie is taught to recognize and accept her â€Å"black† identity. However, her identity is problematized by her physical appearance, especially her â₠¬Å"white† skin colour. Living in Boston, Birdie feels that she does not belong to the black community; in Nkrumah students don’t accept her for being a black girl, then she further feels isolated by her dad’s girlfriend, because she is not dark like Cole. â€Å"Others before had made me see the differences between my sister and myself – the texture of our hair, the tings of our kin, the shapes of our features. But Carmen was the one to make me feel that those things somehow mattered. To make me feel that the differences were deeper than skin,† (Senna, 1998, p.91). The students are not the only ones who make Birdie feel as if she doesn’t fit in; Carmen makes her feel as if inferior because of her lighter complexion. The concept of altering an identity in order to fit in relates to the bell hooks article â€Å"Representing Whiteness in Black Imagination.† In this piece, hooks talks about the terror of whiteness that black people face in which they are afraid and decide to â€Å"wear the mask† to fit into society, (Hooks, 1992, p.341). When Birdie is at Nkrumah, she seems to be wearing this mask to fit in with the children at her school when she forces herself to learn slang and adopt a different attitude and dressing sense. The character of Birdie in the novel constantly changesShow MoreRelatedPassing As An Integral Part Of African American Literature2601 Words   |  11 Pages Kevan Josephs 04/29/15 Dr. Rose-Brown ENGL-244 Caucasia â€Å"Passing as white is, of course, how modernists would have understood the term. But even in this, its first cultural sense, passing is far more complicated than the notion of Wearing a mask or of assuming a fraudulent identity would suggest†¦Passing—actual and Imaginary, conscious and unconscious—at once produced profound shifts in thinking About the boundaries of identity and aroused ambivalence about those shifting, unstable Borders†Read MoreEssay on Whiteness in Danzy Senna’s Novel, Caucasia 821 Words   |  4 Pages Danzy Senna’s Caucasia is a third wave feminist text that shows the reader how identities are socially constructed. It is a heartfelt story about the conflicts of an interracial family in an extremely racialised America during the 1970s. This novel treads on the border between whiteness and blackness through the standpoint of Birdie Lee. Birdie is able to manipulate her identity and fit into different spaces as required by her mother, Sandy Lee. Throughout the novel, the reader is shown how raceRead MoreAnalysis Of The Poem Caucasia By Danzy Senna Essay2343 Words   |  10 PagesCaucasia written by Danzy Senna, is similar and yet different compared to Song of Solomon. In Caucasia, Birdie is a young bi-racial girl, in which she is the daughter of a black man and white woman. While Birdie appears and passes for white, she embraces her black identity even more so. Birdi e is torn apart from those she loves, yet she undergoes a journey to find them. In Song of Solomon, there is an all black family- the Dead family, that struggles within itself and within an all black community