"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

Paper Summary:

"The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", by James Weldon Johnson, examines the relationship between race and class in America during the early 1900s. The narrator, a light-skinned man belonging to both the black and white races, finds conflict in his search for identity and meaning within the American consciousness. This paper shows that the narrator's tragic position as a mulatto in America is found in a literary class seen in the autobiographies of authors like Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

From the Paper:

"In his description of the tendency for dark-skinned blacks to marry those fairer than themselves he argues that blacks select in favor of fairer complexions because of the imperatives of the society they inhabit, not because they themselves can observe the superiority of whiteness in American society. Certainly the two reasons need not exclude each other; by underscoring only the social cause of this phenomenon, he ignores the self-loathing implicit in, and politics of, such choices."

More papers on "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man":

• Book Review # 114807 : "Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man"
• Analytical Essay # 64838 : "The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man"
• Comparison Essay # 109103 : "Invisibility as an Escape from Racial Degradation"

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