She believes in a new identity and a new meaning of whiteness and blackness, which transcends the centuries-old restrictive ideas about race. Senna argues that skin-based identity is the shallowest and most hollow form of identity construction since it can be easily fabricated. Identity on the other hand should be more a matter of who you are internally than how you look. It must be based on various affiliations and a person's willingness to abandon or embrace any or all of them. This means that how a person is educated, how he or she thinks, what a person believes in, what they stand for and what they are willing to support, endorse or abandon should construct an identity for them instead of skin whiteness or blackness. Even the force of black or white gaze can be managed with fabrications as we saw in the case of...
The black gaze ignored her till she changed a few things and became more noticeable. The same would apply to a black person trying to be white.What Birdie learns is that race, like many other issues of identity is mutable, if your appearance is "passable." One thing that is particualy interesting is that blackness is an ideal in the work, and the white daughter (Birdie) is not the favored daughter. "Danzy Senna's 1998 novel, Caucasia, casts blackness as the ideal, desired identity. For protagonist Birdie Lee and her sister, Cole -- offspring of a civil
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now