34 The Nation. November 25, 2019
THE MARANISS FAMILY (COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER AND THE MARANISS FAMILY)can escape racial identity altogether but
rather view it as a phenomenon that offers
tools for collective expression and shared
struggle against the social order. Race can
be of service to those seeking to exploit,
suppress, and dehumanize others; it can
also be a means for rehumanization and
power. We can begin to recognize this if
we take seriously the desire for blackness
that Williams dis misses out of hand as
worthless. Why do we persist in embracing
blackness, and what do we gain from it?
I don’t know that anyone can offer a pat
answer to that question, but there are many
examples of a far more productive line of
inquiry than Williams’s. Larsen’s Passing
comes most readily to mind, in which the
protagonist, Irene Redfield, reels from the
sudden appearance of her childhood friend
Clare, who has been passing for white and
has reappeared in Harlem to rekindle old
friendships. Talking with her husband, Bri-
an, Irene wonders why Clare would return
and risk revealing that she’s been pass-
ing. “It’s always that way,” Brian responds.
“Never known it to fail. They always come
back. I’ve seen it happen time and time
again.” “But why?” Irene demands. All
Brian can offer is a provocation, both to
her and the reader: “If I knew that, I’d know
what race is.”
Larsen’s novel offers us a compelling
study in the power and appeal of racial
identity, and it forces us to call into ques-
tion what many Americans have come to
think of as race in a country where black
people like Clare pass as white. The ex-
istence of black people who do not look
black is evidence of American racial ideol-
ogy’s inchoate nature. Brian’s provocation
suggests that race is less a biological than
a social fact. It can also be a zone for Wil-
liams’s unadulterated sovereignty.
That provocation also reminds us that
just because racial identity is a social phe-
nomenon, it does not mean that we would
want to—or necessarily can—banish race
to the realm of pure fiction. Instead the
novel offers us a far more complex con-
ception of identity, one in which passing
simultaneously underlines race’s status as
a social construction and reinscribes it as a
very real structure of desire. When Clare
becomes black again, it’s because she wants
something that only blackness can give
her and is dissatisfied with what whiteness
has to offer. Passing suggests that probing
racial identity necessitates a probing of this
desire, which is also to insist that we cannot
dismiss it as false consciousness. Williams
would do well to learn from Larsen. Q
A
Washington Post editor and two-time
Pulitzer Prize winner, David Mara-
niss is the author or coauthor of a
dozen books, including well-received
biographies of Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama. His latest is a family mem-
oir that Maraniss’s publisher describes as a
“thank-you note to his father.” If it were
simply that, A Good American Family would
be of little interest, except perhaps to the
author’s kinfolk. But Maraniss has fash-
ioned his book into something much more
than an homage to a much-loved parent.
A Good American Family is an empathetic,
though not entirely successful, effort to
understand why his parents and uncle were
drawn to communism in the 1930s and
then why, nearly two decades later, they fell
victim to a frenzied government witch hunt
that targeted them because of these convic-
tions. If only obliquely, the book thereby
takes on two topics central to 20th centuryhistory: the allure of communism during
the heyday of the Old Left and the sub-
sequent impulse to label otherwise loyal
citizens as un-American because of their
radical commitments.
Maraniss is hardly the first person to
engage with these questions; whole his-
toriographies have emerged around the
influence and legacy of communism, anti-
communism, and anti-anti-communism in
American life. Yet such questions are sa-
lient today, when the evident exhaustion of
conventional politics may once again bring
more radical alternatives, whether on the
left or the right, into play.I
n the Red Scare that erupted after
World War II, Elliott Maraniss, the
author’s father, was the smallest of
small fry, but his prewar flirtation with
communism nonetheless sufficed to get
him fired from his editorial position with
the Detroit Times. Though neither impris-
oned nor even charged with a crime—his
principal offense was refusing to answerTHE PROMISE OF AMERICA
A family’s misfortunes in the age of McCarthyism
by ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Andrew Bacevich is a professor emeritus of history
and international relations at Boston University.