How Can the New Negro Generation Overcome Stereotypes and Misrepresentation

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African-American Criticism
Introduction
Cultural memory through literature shape contemporary actions and directly influence how African American’s and whites interact. While the racial past is traumatizing and burdensome, the shared history has remained a crucial source for solidarity and healing over the years. Writing is an ongoing project that has for many years sought to convert a racist society into a race specific yet non-racist society. As such, the political content of African Americans reconceives race and makes contemporary America the ideal ground where African Americans, like whites, can live, speak, write, create, and persuade without bias. Much of African American literature has had goals ranging from challenging racial hierarchies, influencing social structures, influencing politics, and shaping public opinion, especially in the era of slavery and segregation. “The political content of African American literature includes correcting stereotypes of African American’s, correcting the misrepresentation of African Americans in American history” (Tyson 385).
Correcting Stereotypes and Misrepresentations of African American’s
Historically, racial research has proved that the "othered" status, which is the non-white, is perceived as problematic. Tyson writes that “racial categorization does not reflect biological reality but rather the current beliefs about race at different times" (Tyson 372). Society constructs race and has over the years divided it into two hostile identities, namely black and white. In her novel "Passing," Nella Larsen presents a notion that there are privileges of “passing” life as a white person than being black; that is why people manipulate aspects such as looks, behaviors, and etiquette to attain an identity perceived to carry more privileges. Both of Larsen’s characters, Clare and Irene, desire to adopt an integrated identity of both black and white even though blood running in them assigns the identity black.
Clare has a black mother and white father but has "whitened" her lifestyle by adjusting everything, including clothing, behavior, and gestures, while openly denying her blackness. Even though she chooses to pass as a white woman, a sense of isolation creeps in, making her want to feel associated with the black identity. As quoted, "For I am lonely, so lonely… cannot help to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; you can't know-how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other than I once thought I was glad to be free of… it's like an ache, a pain that never ceases" (Larsen 7). There is a great sense of desperation for Clare to identify with blacks, especially her close friend Irene. Clare's decision to pass as a white woman certainly was wrong, and she promises to do everything possible to regain her freedom. But even though she wants to identify as black, the thought of abandoning the white privileges cannot allow her, and she has to play in between the two identities.
On the other hand, Irene has equally decided to pass as a white woman but admitting her black origin. In one of the opening scenes, once, char...