When I was 12, my Aunt Margaret told me, “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white. Tags: Mat Johnson, Topic MagazineĬomments Off on The ability to pass oneself off as white-to choose between living with their existing identity or adopt the dominant racial identity-is the most extreme colorism privilege. Mat Johnson, “ Passing, in Moments,” Topic Magazine, Issue Number 25: Journeys (July 2019). Instead, within the black community, family passing stories often serve other purposes: as a way of emphasizing the absurdity of race as an example of a family’s access to the privileges of colorism as a trickster performance of the ultimate racial transgression. And yet, the intra-community discussion about passing tends to avoid the question of the morality of the act. Passing is, at its essence, abandonment of the group to better the individual. In an ethnic group in which “selling out” or being an “ Uncle Tom” are major taboos, it’d be understandable if the discussion of passing focused on the supreme selfishness of the act. It’s not an option to which the vast majority of black Americans has access. The ability to pass oneself off as white-to choose between living with their existing identity or adopt the dominant racial identity-is the most extreme colorism privilege. Tags: Interminable Rambling, Mat Johnson, Matthew Teutsch, Warren PleeceĬomments Off on Deconstructing Whiteness in “Incognegro” Today, I want to look at a couple of moments from Incognegro and discuss how these moments add to the class’s discussions we have had throughout the course of the semester…

We concluded the semester with Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, a graphic novel that breaks down constructs of race and highlights the ways that society, especially those who want to maintain power, constructs one’s identity. We explored it in the ways that Manar navigates her identity in a new land in Mohja Kahf’s “Manar of Hama” to the ways that Long Vanh navigates his Afro-Asian identity in the face of the community and his own family in Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith’s The Land South of the Clouds. We looked at this from the beginning of the semester through the end. This semester, in my Ethnic American Literature course, we explored the ways that we, as individuals, construct our identities based on ourselves and on the ways that others view us, specifically when they place their preconceived notions upon us. However, when a class ends poignantly on a recurring theme, I find it a really serendipitous occasion. No matter the class, I construct my courses around themes, all teachers do. SmithĮvery semester, I am amazed at the connective tissue that runs through the texts I place on the syllabus and the themes that arise. Matthew Teutsch, Director of the Lillian E.

Incognegro by mat johnson