The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

The narrator directly addresses the implications of passing on ideas about racial identity throughout the novel. He vacillates between seeing notions about racial identity as a cosmic joke on white people to understanding the perils of success or failure in living out his racial identities.

The joke, which he mentions in relation to his reaction when white people disparage Black people, is that the line between Black and white must be one of perception instead of some biological reality. If the narrator can pass for white, that must mean that biological arguments used to justify white supremacy and racial segregation are not fact-based. The debate the narrator overhears in the smoker car as he heads South the second time shows what is really at the root of segregation. What mostly keeps Southern, anti-Black racism in business is irrationality and self-interest. Racial passing is thus a direct challenge to anti-Black racism, and there is no such thing as race as anything other than a social construct.

On the other hand, race and racial identity have real power, and the ability/inability to adhere to ideas about racial identity can have serious consequences. We see the dawning of this idea on the narrator as he confronts the implications of his racial identity. He is publicly labeled as Black at school one day, and when he goes home that night, the narrator confronts a paradox. He sees himself in the mirror as a young man with skin of an “ivory whiteness” (15); however, he also sees himself as a person who will have to deal with racism and a lack of opportunities from people who see him as less than because he is Black. This dual psychological reality is double-consciousness, articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois, an author the narrator comes to adore as he explores Black literature.

The narrator is challenged by others’ perceptions of him and Black culture as something to be despised, so for much of the novel, we see him striving to transcend the limits of Black racial identity as a marker of inferiority. His belief that he can create music that will counter white supremacist ideas about Black people and culture is rooted in this quest. He fails in this quest, however, once he realizes that there is no rational way to address racism.

This failure is most apparent to the narrator when he witnesses the lynching of a Black man in Macon, Georgia. The victim of lynching may or may not have violated the racial code that he must at all times be subordinate to whites by respecting the sanctity of white women’s virtue. However, just the “rumor that some terrible crime had been committed, murder! rape!” (181) is enough to condemn him to a barbaric death. The narrator is equal parts horrified and intrigued that racist conceptions of Black identity have the ability to transform white men from “human beings into savage beasts” (183) and reduce Black people to bodies that can be robbed of “reasoning power” (183) as well.

The narrator, who is passively passing as he witnesses the lynching, comes to see that no matter how irrational notions of racial identity are, the lengths to which people will go to police the perceived boundary between Black and white requires that he choose and perform perfectly one of those identities or else face destruction.

One of the means by which the narrator explores Black identity is through his travels. By moving through multiple geographies, the narrator comes to understand that where he is shapes who he is.

In early Black American literature, identity was dependent on the two directional poles of north and south. In the North, especially before the United States instituted the restrictive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, to be a Black person was to escape the constrictions of freedom of movement that were attached to being Black and enslaved. Ex-slave narrators like Frederick Douglass recount in their works how throwing off the burden of having to account for where you were to any random white person was the first mark of freedom. Johnson’s narrator spends much of his life in the North and so assumes that the freedom he experiences is the norm.

Between 1912 and 1927, the two years of publication for the novel, the city (and the Northern city in particular) became a space where Black people could escape Jim Crow laws and become a modern people as they created art and music that celebrated Blackness unabashedly. In the early 1900s, many Black migrants from the rural and Southern United States experienced the same sense of hope and expectation the narrator identifies when he first sees New York. The city, not just the North, became a place where freedom was attainable.

Johnson uses the narrator’s retrospective lens to complicate the representation of the city. As a young man, the narrator describes New York as a “gold” and “green” city full of promise; in the present moment, he now recognizes that the city was also a deceptively beautiful “witch” who hides her age and danger behind that beautiful face (86). Through the lens of experience, the narrator sees that the promise of freedom in the city was a false one, considering the narrator was confined by addictive habits, economic precarity, and racism within a mere “ten blocks” (110) of the city. Black migrants experienced this half-free, half-constrained existence as they confronted the city during this and subsequent historical periods.

Travel abroad extended the zones of freedom available to Black people. Like the narrator, Frederick Douglass, Black visual artists, and Black writers flocked to European capitals like Paris. So long as the Black travelers did not turn a critical eye on immigrants from European countries’ colonial territories, they had the refreshing experience of being recognized as American rather than as a despised or pitied minority.

The narrator’s account of Paris, from beginning to end, maintains the celebratory sense of how free he is to wander through the streets, museums, and orchestral halls. Being in Europe permanently changes the narrator’s identity. By the time the narrator finishes his stay in Paris, his representation shifts to that of a sophisticate who speaks confidently about why Londoners are more unhappy than Parisians and why the English countryside is better than London. The narrator’s Black identity in this episode is a modern, cosmopolitan one that shows what Black people can become if they have the freedom to escape an American geography.

However, such geographic freedom does have a downside. The narrator insists on returning to the United States, and the South in particular, because he sees the South as the ground for all that is unique about Black identity. He believes that seeing the originators of ragtime and other parts of Black folk and oral culture in the flesh is a necessary part of understanding the music enough to transform it into high art. However, this idealized notion of the South as a place of authentic Black identity shifts when the narrator is forced to recognize that the South is also a place in which restrictive racial codes can be lethal. This last frightening stop on the map of Black American identity convinces the narrator to relinquish his Black identity.