High-Low in American Identity

This takes me to Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound, his painful and honest reversal of his earlier "avoidance" of writing about black people. Over and over Berry ends up talking about the division between ownership and labor, and he uses the same words you have to explain, with some surprise, that this division is actually liminal, not a wall, but a threshold between rooms of experience. You and he make the point that crossing this threshhold involves identity, and identity is social -"to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture" -so it requires transgression. I think you open a door on, at very least, current American politics here: social transgression elicits generally predictable responses: "high" people experience disdain and fear when the "low" try to pass, and the "low" experience contempt and bitterness when the "high" try to pass. In response, we learn to hide our transgressive interests and behaviors in attempted naturalness, and in hiding we put on a disguise, and we become adept at trying on and even parading the others' clothes. This way Americans bring much of the theater into our public personae: the costume, the behavior [first caricatured and stereotyped, eventually maybe so adept that we can 'pass'], even the inhabiting of a character so fully that we, in fact, change. This can be cruel theater, as in minstrelsy and blackface, it can be a phase or a game for the young, and I think it can also be an act of earnest reaching out and understanding. However well done, this role-playing tends to support some amount of empathy, of compassion, or maybe democratic sentiment. It's not often done aggressively. Usually some envy or social craving or desire is involved, making the transgression poignant and loaded. This is how we Americans operate in social settings of any diversity whatsoever: we play a role for the present audience. My speech changes radically from meeting to meeting: my rich Mormon clients hear one V, my carpenters hear another, my banker hears another, and my dinner guests hear another. I'm not sure there's a "real V" anywhere "in here", except what I can identify as the me who changes from place to place, wearing whatever clothes fit the company, no matter how poorly they fit. Maybe we are more like Antoinette slumming with the milkmaids in the Trianon than Ruskin struggling to understand the Cornish farmers and refusing their offers of beer. Berry has a section in The Hidden Wound that shows a white child moving freely between black and white worlds on his father's plantation. A year later the child's sexuality suddenly buds, and immediately his white family remove him from contact with the slaves, and begin to coach him on "who he is", and on "putting away childish things". He is coerced into a set of distinctions he would not have made otherwise. His parents try to freeze his identity and to erect a wall around it.