The Blacker the Berry...

Thurman, Wallace. "The Blacker the Berry..." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 636-49. Print.

This reading brought up two interesting notions that hadn’t yet been addressed in this class. The first is the idea of segregation within a race. I’m continually surprised when groups or individuals that are discriminated against turn around and themselves discriminate against another group. It is, for lack of a better word, idiotic. Instead of working together as a unit to combat the racism they both face, different shades of “black” populations fight each other with racism while fighting racism from white people. It’s a kind of passing the buck idea: “well, we’re hated, so let’s find someone else to hate!” I don’t understand it at all, other than the fact that it is a base, primal feeling akin to an instinct.

The second notion I caught was the idea of a white man “passing” as black. Although the characters in this story joke about it, since the man is very white, it is still an interesting turn-around of the “passing” we’ve been reading about recently. The first thing that comes to mind is “why”. After all, black people didn’t exactly have it easy during this time period – why would a white man choose to hang out with black people in a black night club? Although at first I thought it was strange, it’s actually a kind of bittersweet poetic statement. Thurman barely hits on the notion of transcending race, as discussed by Toomer, but this little twist of the story comes close to making a statement to that effect. It is especially poignant because of the attitudes of the main character, who feels so wronged because she is a very dark shade of black. I don’t believe that she learns anything from the reversal of roles concerning the white man “passing”, which is a bit of a shame – she seemed to be, for the most part, unimportant to the story.