Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to illuminate the conditions of possibility which have marked being both Black and Jewish in the United States as unusual or different as a result of an ambiguous slippage in which Jewish blends into mental images of whiteness. It is argued that to be Black, Jewish and interracial is to occupy a three-tier standpoint position: it is a cognitive and physical process of being in the world--in, and as a result of, a race conscious society--to be an interruption, to represent contestation and to undermine the authority of classification. ;The study highlights the meaning of "bi-racialism" in general, and specifically investigates whether, how and why Americans of both African-American and Jewish heritage identify themselves as members of, or in relation to, groups whose histories include a legacy of legal and political discrimination as racial others . The Prelude and Chapter Two tackle issues of identity from slightly different angles. Chapter Two focuses on the meaning of identity as a concept and a phenomenon as it figures in philosophical and political thought and provides the theoretical framework which frames the approach to the discourses underlying the ethnographic material . Chapters Three and Four turn to Jewish and Black themes and introduce the idea of Jewish, Black and interracial identities as an encompassing identity. Chapter Five incorporates the preceding chapters into a presentation and analysis of the interviews with the eight people who are Jewish, Black and interracial. The analysis of the material draws from three complementary theoretical domains; the Jewish, the American and the French field of phenomenology. ;The organizational structure of the dissertation accentuates the focus on an idea of identity--being black, Jewish and interracial--conditioned by the specificity of the United States. The contributions selected from the interviews are then treated as testimony on behalf of this idea. This method facilitates using interviews as an illustration for, rather than an imposition on, the viability of the dissertation's propositions