ABSTRACT
Ross's account of identity may well satisfy the goal set out by Thomas Holt that "black children" retain their blackness and thus their peoplehood. In doing so, however, it preserves something Holt had tried to relegate to the twentieth-century past: the color line. In preserving a color line, racial rhapsody differs in important ways from the accounts of racial identity set out by other critics. Racial rhapsody produces an identity distinct, for instance, from what Charles Mills calls "a racial self": "it is because of race," Mills asserts, "that one does or does not count as a full person", which leads to "a twotiered, morally partitioned population divided between white persons and nonwhite subpersons". If the type of identity specific to racial rhapsody stands apart from Mills's concern, the extension or restoration of rational Enlightenment selfhood to nonwhites, it also stands apart from the somewhat different view of racial identity set out by K. Anthony Appiah.
