Life as a White Man in The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man :: Biography Biographies Essays

Life as a White Man in The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man...the effect is a intention toward lighter complexions, specially among the more active elements in the race. well-nigh might claim that this is a tacit admission of colored people among themselves of their profess inferiority judged by the color line. I do not think so. What I redeem termed an inconsistency is, after all, most natural it is, in fact, a tendency in accordance with what might be called an economic necessity. So far as racial differences go, the United States puts a greater premium on color, or better, lack of color, than upon anything else in the world. --the protagonist (page 72)James Weldon Johnsons first-person narrator in his fictional account, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, forwards a cynical, if not Darwinian, point-of-view about peel color. He claims it is most natural for bare people to procreate with those who ar lighter skinned. And he coolly excuses this supposedly common practic e as pure economic necessity. The Black Nationalist must protest this fatalism. The redness simply chalks another one up for his side. What about the humanist? What is he or she to make of such unreasonable and callous tactics use to pursue the American Dream? The sympathetic humanist might arise at first, but would eventually concur. For its hard to argue with poverty. At the date the novel was published (1912), America held very few opportunities for the Negro population. Some of the more successful black men, men with money and street savvy, were practically porters for the railroads. In other words the best a young black man might hope for was a position serving whites on trains. Our protagonist--while not adverse to hard work, as evidenced by his cigar paradiddle apprenticeship in Jacksonville--is an artist and a scholar. His ambitions are immense considering the situation. And thanks to his hand several(prenominal) skinned complexion, he is able to realize many, if not a ll, of them. There is some evidence that connects our protagonists line of thinking with his upbringing. Our protagonists mother tells him, The best blood of the sec is in you, (page 8) when the child asks whom his father is. Clearly, his mother was proud of (and perhaps restrained in love with) this genteel white man who gave her a son. So his bold pronouncements make much sense in light of his own condition.