Caucasia: Birdie's Character Danzy Senna's Essay

She believes in a new identity and a new meaning of whiteness and blackness, which transcends the centuries-old restrictive ideas about race. Senna argues that skin-based identity is the shallowest and most hollow form of identity construction since it can be easily fabricated. Identity on the other hand should be more a matter of who you are internally than how you look. It must be based on various affiliations and a person's willingness to abandon or embrace any or all of them. This means that how a person is educated, how he or she thinks, what a person believes in, what they stand for and what they are willing to support, endorse or abandon should construct an identity for them instead of skin whiteness or blackness.Even the force of black or white gaze can be managed with fabrications as we saw in the case of Birdie. The black gaze ignored her till she changed a few things and became more noticeable. The same would apply to a black person trying to be white.

In conclusion, we can say that black gaze, blackness or white gaze and whiteness do not hold much significance when seen in the light of Birdie's transformations. A person's sense of blackness is very fickle because it can be easily molded and controlled with some changes in appearance and speech. What however is very real and worth trusting is the identity based on years of experience, values, beliefs and convictions.

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