SOURCE: Thompson, Debby. “‘What Exactly Is a Black?’: Interrogating the Reality of Race in Jean Genet's The Blacks.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 26, no. 2 (summer 2002): 395-425.

In the following excerpt, Thompson provides a broad discussion of race within The Blacks, arguing that the purpose of the play is not the determination of “blackness,” but the dramatization of white guilt and how to embrace the issue of racial relations.

The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Blackness exists, but “only” as a function of its signifiers.

—Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey

To be inauthentic is sometimes the best way to be real.

—Paul Gilroy, “‘… to be real’: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture”

On the dedication page of the Grove Press, English translation of The Blacks: A Clown Show Genet asks, “what exactly is a black?” This is...