Danzy Sennas Caucasia Essay -- Danzy Senna Caucasia Essays

Danzy Sennas CaucasiaIn Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, dame sp shuttings time in several different racial contexts and, in distributively one, ad unspoilts the racial definition of herself. Through this process, she discovers much ab step to the fore the conception of speed in contemporary American society and achieves the nuanced understanding that race, while precisely a construction, is still (operationally) real. This is contrasted by the more dangerous, oversimplified understanding of race that races be biological rivals, inherently different and unable to coexist without some consort of power structure embodied by the character of Redbone, who is also a symbol of inauthenticity. This latter aspect of Redbone shows the emptiness inherent in the views he holds virtually race, an important reason for his inclusion in the novel.Redbone, which, interestingly enough, fit to urbandictionary.com literally means a light-skinned black person with sharp red hair, is an incredibly ou tspoken advocate of the revolution (the movement mean to allow Blacks to overthrow Whites in the American power-structure) and the need to use fierceness to bring it about. In the scene where Redbone shows Birdie the guns, he says, This little young lady aint no security risk, brotha. We gotta raise our children to know how to defend (Senna 15). He also tells Deck that maybe he needs to run short his head out of them books and put some action behind them high-falutin theories of his (16). This expression of black vs. white politics as unabashed advocating of violence and this jeer and belittling of intellectualism as high-falutin in favor of insufficiently thought-out action shows just how facile 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-serving a nd facile view of race, Redbone serves as Sennas symbol that they go hand in hand, that is, that such conceptions are empty and inauthentic non true to the way the world actually works. As we begin to dubiousness 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.