African American Review

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, then head of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, was revealed to be perming her hair and wearing brown makeup in order to pass as African American, despite having neither a historical nor genetic connection to Americans of African descent. She was, she claimed, “transracial,” in the same way that some people are transgender, applying to racial identity the concept articulated by Judith Butler that gender is performative. Dolezal was, however, widely derided for using Butler to legitimize what some considered a version of blackface. It is in this context that one can imagine the dismay of seeing Patrick Maley attribute Dolezal’s rationale to August Wilson: “Race for Wilson,” he says, “turns out to be performative in much the same way that Judith Butler theorizes gender” (46).

In Maley’s defense, he seems unaware that “performative” is not a synonym for “performed” or “in performance” (in the same way that he appears not to know that “humanism” is not a synonym for “humanity”). Rather, Butler is using speech act theory to distinguish performatives, that is, words that effect a change (e.g., “I do,” in a wedding ceremony) from those that designate a condition (e.g., “I do [have a cold]”). But Maley’s injustice to Wilson also derives from misreading Wilson’s answers to interview questions about his blackness, given his white father. Although the answer is obvious (Wilson, a Black man from a Black family headed by a Black mother, and identified as such by their community, was aptly perceived and treated as Black throughout his life, because he was), Maley incorrectly interprets as “ambiguity” (46) Wilson’s impatience with the topic. Wilson’s discomfort more likely reflected something akin to the way Frederick Douglass might have reacted had the former slave been asked why he “chose” to identify with his Black mother over his white father. Wilson’s alleged ambiguity, however, anchors Maley’s thesis that Wilson craved a sense of identity, manifest as a “persistent need to perform black self-hood” (46). Unfortunately, this assertion of a world with, à la Dolezal, “transracial” potentials, is less a faux pas than a foundational tenet of the book, implicit throughout, and expressed explicitly in comments such as, “The Hill District may have offered Wilson no other racial identity than blackness” (47). Identity exists for Maley, therefore, in the confirmation that one has pulled off a successful performance. In this context, Maley believes that “call-and-response,” which he considers to be any appeal for audience affirmation, defines the blues (a definition under which even the “Declaration of Independence” is blues). Thus, Wilson’s need to craft an audience-ratified performance of identity makes Wilson a “bluesman.”

This straw man—Wilson craving his identity—doesn’t resemble the August Wilson I knew, a man who refused to be compromised by external affirmation. In Fences, Troy Maxson screams at Corey, “Who the hell say I got to like you?,” thereby renouncing the value Maley places—and that he claims the blues places— on identity as craving affirmation. “Don’t you go through life,” Troy emphatically states, “worrying about if somebody like you or not.” Wilson therefore shunned the luxuries that Hollywood producers attempted to heap on him because, as he told me, “You get used to it, so when they start to take it away, they got you!” His rejecting Hollywood seduction mirrors his refusing, much earlier, as a part-time cook earning less than ninety dollars a week, a Broadway contract that usurped his artistic control despite the contract’s big advance (six figures, in 2020 dollars). And certainly Wilson at age fifteen must have had a powerful sense of identity to quit high school because [End Page 244] a teacher believed his research paper was too good for him to have written it. (Maley repeatedly claims that this event exemplified Wilson’s rejection of a white teacher’s evaluation, although, in fact, the teacher was Black.) Wilson...