Kyle Lewis

Professor Erica Richardson

BLS 3085 Essay 2 Prompt 3
18 Apr, 2021

The color of an individual’s skin has a much greater significance than just it being a

physical characteristic which has been true historically. This is especially applicable to being a

black person as the skin color has profoundly influenced the unique experiences of black people

especially regarding how they are perceived and treated, and how they have developed over time

with respect to them. The Younger family in the play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) by playwright

Lorraine Hansberry are in the process of moving into an all-white neighborhood in which they

would end up being the only black people in that neighborhood and a man from there enters their

new home to offer the family money to move back out, while Clay’s (a black man) interaction

with Lula (a white woman) in the play Dutchman (1964) by writer Amiri Baraka is another

scenario of the black experience. The former is a situation that entails that an all-white

neighborhood would not want black people to move into it and they (even though a man from the

neighborhood appears to be friendly) consider them to be outsiders, while the latter is a situation

that involves a black man interacting with a white woman which does transform into romance a

little later on (which was considered to be taboo).

Being alienated and the feeling of not belonging is one kind of situation that black people

have gone through. A Raisin in the Sun is about a black family in South Chicago (which is set

during the 1950s) and in the third scene in Act II of the play, the Younger family are preparing to

move into an all-white neighborhood and a man named Karl Lindner meets with them to offer

them money to not move in as he and the neighborhood would not want to live alongside the

family. According to the play,

LINDNER. …I am sure you people must be aware of some of the incidents which have

happened in various parts of the city when colored people have moved into certain
areas… we deplore that kind of thing… [and] we are trying to do something about it…

that’s the way we feel out in Clybourne Park

… a man, right or wrong, has the right to want to have the neighborhood he lives in a

certain kind of way. And at the moment the overwhelming majority of our people out

there feel that people get along better, take more of a common interest in the life of the

community, when they share a common background. I want you to believe me when I tell

you that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it. It is a matter of the people of

Clybourne Park believing, rightly or wrongly, as I say, that for the happiness of all

concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities.

BENEATHA. (With a grand and bitter gesture) This, friends, is the Welcoming

Committee!

WALTER. (Dumbfounded, looking at LINDNER) IS this what you came marching all

the way over here to tell us?

LINDNER. You see—in the face of all the things I have said, we are prepared to make

your family a very generous offer …

(Putting on his glasses and drawing a form out of the briefcase) Our association is

prepared, through the collective effort of our people, to buy the house from you at a

financial gain to your family.

WALTER. …Get out of my house, man. (Hansberry, Lorraine 116-119).

Lindner is being subtly discriminating against the Younger family as he and the inhabitants of

the neighborhood he is from would not want to live alongside black people. The neighborhood

that Lindner is from is nicer than where the Younger family is moving out of. This play takes

places in the 1950s, a time when racism was much more prevalent. White people perceived black

people to be less than them and different (negatively) and thus treated them accordingly. Also,

white people lived separately from black people and under better conditions than they did. It was

common for them to live in better neighborhoods (nicer and safer) while where black people

lived, they were more run-down and more dangerous by comparison. Lindner prefers for black

people to be segregated from white people, and that they should live in their own respective

communities.

Another kind of scenario among experiences unique to black people is the relationship

(of any kind) between a black man and a white woman which resulted in harm being done to the

man if white people ever found out as they strongly frowned upon that. Dutchman is about two

characters which are Clay (a black male), and Lula (a white female), riding the subway in New

York City and the interaction between the two. According to the play,

…a man [is] sitting in a subway seat, holding a magazine but looking vacantly just above

its wilting pages. Occasionally he looks blankly toward the window on his right… The

man is sitting alone… The train slaws after a time, pulling to a brief stop at one of the

stations. The man looks idly up, until he sees a woman’s face staring at him through the

window; when it realizes that the man noticed the face, it very premeditatedly to smile.

The man smiles too, for a moment, without a trace of self-consciousness… LULA enters

from the rear of the car… [and goes] toward CLAY. She stops beside CLAY’S seat…

LULA. Hello.
 CLAY. Uh, hi’re you? (Baraka, Amiri 1).

The bare minimum of even of both of the characters smiling at each other to having a

conversation were what white people during the mid-20th century were highly against. Such

interaction for black men to have with white woman led to those men being brutalized in a

multitude in ways (i.e. lynched, beat up, killed, etc.) if they were ever to get caught. Also, the

white woman could claim to be a victim of rape or violence and they would be believed even if

she was lying, which would also result in the black man getting in trouble. Clay and Lula’s

interaction would become “romantic” after quite a bit of time passes of the two getting

acquainted later on in the play, the two would have their respective outbursts about each other,

and then Lula would kill him. She then finds another black man to deceptively prey upon.

(Baraka, Amiri). Lula always had the intention of preying on Clay and getting him into trouble or

killing him as such interaction between black men and white woman were not considered

acceptable by her race of people. The final scene with involving Lula and another black man

conveys this.

Both plays A Raisin in the Sun and Dutchman depict unique experiences of blackness and

how they reflect on social history around the mid-1900s. Both exemplify black people receiving

particularly negative treatment (Lindner talking about him and the people from his neighborhood

not wanting to live alongside black people to the Younger family in the former, Lula ultimately

killing Clay in the end in the latter). Racial discrimination, racial segregation (A Raisin in the

Sun) and black men having any kind of interaction with white women, especially romantic which

white people considered to be unacceptable (Dutchman), were a big deal at the time.
 The experience of undergoing racial discrimination and racial segregation is aptly

exemplified in scene three in act II of A Raisin in the Sun because the Younger family are in the

process of moving to where their living conditions would improve, which is an all-white

neighborhood, and Lindner met with the family and offered to buy the home they are moving

into. In Dutchman, the play as a whole contains a dramatized situation of a black man interacting

with a white woman (considered unacceptable by white people).