Race

In “Race,” Elizabeth Alexander interrogates the stories people tell about race. In the first stanza, the first-person speaker reveals the hard facts of some family history—namely, that Great-Uncle Paul and family members of that generation left the South to transform themselves. Alexander sets up a contrast between what these inventions are by relying on visual imagery and repetition in the first stanza. Paul and his siblings are “pale skinned, / as straight-haired, as blue-eyed” (Lines 5-6) as each other, but their appearances signify different things because of their choices. Alexander uses the words “black” and “white” four times each in this stanza to set up the contrast between Paul’s choice to pass as white as a “forester in Oregon” (Line 2) and his siblings’ choice to maintain Black identities with the move to New York. The respective spouses—Paul’s “white wife” (Line 4) and the “Brown-skinned spouses” (Line 11)—declare where the siblings stand on the issue of racial identity. Where Paul is “fundamentally white” (Line 3), the siblings are emphatically “black!” (Line 11), a point Alexander makes by using the exclamation point.

Near the end of the first stanza, Alexander introduces a line the speaker repeats later—“Many others have told, and not told this tale” (Line 12).