TPPM Watts: (16) The illusion

[Paul Nightingale]

"The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was to believe for a long
time in the white version of what a Negro was supposed to be. But with
the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went too."

Consider Mead's distinction between the 'I' (my sense of who I am) and
the 'Me' (my awareness of how others see me, which interacts, and might
be in conflict, with the 'I') in Mind, Self and Society (1934); or
Goffman's distinction between virtual and actual social identity in
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963; references to
the 1990 Penguin ed). Such concepts (and ways of conceptualising
identity) underpinned the 1960s ethnography, precisely because they are
tools for journeying into the subject's mind. Goffman goes on to refer
to stigma as "an attribute that stigmatises one type of possessor can
confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable
nor discreditable as a thing in itself" (Stigma, 13).

As examples ...

I'm thinking of Kazan's film Gentleman's Agreement (1947) to illustrate
the point being made here. That's about anti-semitism, of course, so
what about Roth's The Human Stain (2000)?