ABSTRACT
The section on African Americans and American Identity begins with Eugene O’Neill’s controversial play, The Emperor Jones. Though initially viewed as anti-racist, the play is now more commonly condemned for racism. The most reasonable view appears to be that it is both. It often draws on what are at best problematic cognitive models and implicit associations for understanding and responding to African Americans. (Indeed, the very idea of responding to African Americans—or any other large, diverse group—is problematic.) But this already ambiguous and ambivalent work becomes still more complex—and possibly more revealing—once we come to recognize that one model for Africans in O’Neill’s play is his own ethnic, sub-national group, the Irish. Indeed, this tacit modeling partially underlies some of the more obviously disturbing aspects of the play, such as its emphasis on (O’Neill’s version of) Black English vernacular speech.
