problematize even the things that you have taken for granted

Dear David,

I am writing to you in response to your wonderful work Reading the Runaways, first and foremost to thank you for your contribution to the literature of slave narratives and for problematicizing the perceived simplicity of race under slavery. My second motivation in writing you is to lend some language that might be helpful in fashioning a more clear understanding of exactly how a modern conception of race has subsumed the nuances and key distinctions involved in the narratives, which you have so aptly begun to dissect. The metalanguage of race quietly but effectively silences many of the key differences and intersectionalities that better explain a complex history that is the slave narrative.

My original motivation in writing on race as a metalanguage was in seeking to complicate the accepted notions of the intersections of race and gender, moving from a politic of respectability that saw such relationships of oppressions as a reason to be silent rather than to speak up. Similarly in your work, I see a consistent reading of runaway advertisements by the academy for understanding who the runaways were based in relatively general terms. As you say, “historians have used such advertisements to find out as much as possible about who the runaways were, by sex, generation, and occupation.” What you call a remaking, I see as a possibility to further complicate our conceptions of race as much more fluid and importantly reliant on other markers for definition.

           

The importance you note of changing clothes, language, customs, and even identified race speaks to me of the necessity to further interrogate the place of gender in the performance of a new identity. Even in the critical work, which you have delivered, there is what I see as an apparent overdeterminancy of race endemic of Western culture which in turn obscures the place of class and gender. I must thank you for not fully falling victim to this blurring brought on by race as metalanguage, specifically in your approach to understanding the intersections and limitations of passing as free rather than exclusively seeing runaways as passing for white. Although there are intersecting privileges and possibilities in the passing and performance of both characters in the production of race during this time, your attention to the distinction is critical to the project of better vetting out how race as a metalanguage persists.

I feel as though I am now rambling, but I wanted to again congratulate you on an a wonderful work but to push you further to re-assess and seek even deeper understandings of the ways that “race” on its face has perhaps disguised more delicate social and political mechanisms that may have been at play. I push you to problematize even the things that you have taken for granted recall the unstable and fluid nature that race has maintained even as it pervades most of our studies.

All the best,

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Department of History

University of Pennsylvania