Black or white?
“WHAT I’ve been taught,” reflects Warren Duffy – first- person narrator of Mat Johnson’s Loving Day – is that “if you have any black in you, you’re black.” Never mind that the light- complexioned Warren – like Johnson, a Philadelphia native with a black mother and Irish- American father – is regularly perceived as white.
Johnson knows the feeling: “I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one,” he recently wrote in an essay entitled Proving My Blackness that appeared in May in The New York Times Magazine.
Johnson’s consequent identity crisis echoes what Warren feels, as Warren continually tries to prove his street cred as a “brother”. “I want acknowledgment of shared experience, worldview, ancestry,” Warren tells us, in explaining his strenuous efforts to be black and belong. “It feels so good not to be thrown out.”
But what about the part of him that’s white?
As Johnson asks in another recent essay about his mixed heritage, aren’t mixed- race individuals who insist on identifying as black thereby “shoving their white parent into the
Meera Bowman
closet?”
Running from a failed marriage, Warren is forced to grapple with this question after returning to Philly and moving into the inheritance from his recently deceased father: a crumbling mansion without a roof that Dad had purchased for a song in a now- decrepit, nearly all- black area, reduced by crime and crack to a ghost of its former self.
Situated in the city where Britain’s onetime colonies declared their independence, Warren’s ramshackle mansion is an embodiment of America, a house divided against itself by slavery and haunted by this shameful past’s debilitating legacy: arbitrary and bizarre definitions involving race that straitjacket people like Warren into confining categories rather than allowing them the freedom to grow into themselves.
Two major events challenge Warren to redraw his racial lines.
First, Warren learns he has a nearly grown daughter: Tal is the 17- year- old result of his brief adolescent fling with a now- deceased Jewish teen. Tal’s face reflects both of Warren’s parents – thereby challenging him to live a more expansive definition of himself.