144 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
when we learn of the division that Silk’s “betrayal” produced within
his family. One family member who is particularly bitter about this
“betrayal” is Walter, Silk’s somewhat domineering elder brother.
Unlike Silk, who, according to Walter, was “never fighting for any-
thing other than himself,” his elder brother played an active role
in challenging segregation, “fighting for integration in the schools
of New Jersey” (p. 324). Almost inevitably, working as a “Negro”
teacher in the 1960s, he failed to reach the eminence of (the “white”)
Professor Silk of Athena College. Nonetheless, Walter did come to
succeed in becoming the first black principal of an esteemed white
high school.
In a sense, Walter bore the brunt of the civil-rights burden, the
fruits of which seem to have ironically contributed to the two black
students gaining admission to the university in which Silk taught.
So when the university appears to favor the students in its legal
proceedings, Silk comes head to head with the mechanisms of
“progress” that his brother fought to institutionalize. The dynam-
ics of the relationship between Walter and Silk therefore come to
symbolize two alternative perceptions of ethnicity in American
modernity. The first, which is Walter’s, could be identified as more
political—the product of an era in which blacks were formally pro-
hibited from enjoying the same political and social rights as were
whites. Walter presents this kind of identity politics in a somewhat
confrontational form, with a rigid and often reactionary concep-
tion of ethnicity—the kind Paul Gilroy criticizes for its brittle and
self-limiting outlook.^43 Ernestine, Silk’s sister, offers an insight
into this psychological trait of the elder brother when she explains
to Zuckerman that “Walt could never stand Coleman [... .] In it
for himself, Walt used to say. In it always for Coleman alone. All
he ever wanted was out” (p. 324). Although Gilroy is sensitive to
the fact that identity politics of this kind are an understandable
result of particularly excessive racist social circumstances, he is
nonetheless critical of their reactionary basis and presumptions of
immutable conceptions of ethnicity. Indeed, for Gilroy, the kind
of static and defensive conception of what it means to be black in
America, which Walter appears to exhibit, is potentially harmful
because it does not adequately countenance the realities involved