Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
ramifications of Lee’s imagination of the Other, in this case the Italian American character. Astutely, many note the suburban ennui, the upper-middle-class crises, and the relatively meandering plot, but the question of Jerry’s identity in relation to race and as a form of critical whiteness is absent. What does whiteness signify, and how does Lee’s figuration of Jerry refract and recontextualize minority subjects? The definitions offered by whiteness studies scholars begin to answer such a question. The anthropologist Melanie E. L. Bush explains that “being white has generally been associated with ancestry from the European continent and the denial of African blood. The borders of whiteness have shifted during different periods in history to include or exclude various groups.” But Bush clarifies that “the claim to European heritage is often less significant than whether one is identified as white in everyday interactions” (15). While there are various branches within whiteness studies, I am most concerned with how whiteness has been constructed as a racial identity posited through exclusion.9 Absent an actual definition of “whiteness,” this racial formation appears to solidify only against those bodies and lives deemed deviant or foreign (Babb 43). Pamela Perry offers a definition of white identity that undergirds many such studies in the field, articulating importantly how white identity is seen “as universal, the signifier of perfect human rationality and morality” (380, emphasis in original).10 In these various considerations, whiteness operates on a superstructural level that is ultimately linked to a position from which to draw power.11 Critical race theoreticians and historians such as Ian F. Haney-López, Cheryl I. Harris, and George Lipsitz contend that the politics of white exclusion can be traced to property laws, while Abby L. Ferber argues that white supremacy developed out of the regulation of human sexualities.12
These definitions for white identity seem at first to contrast with Lee’s Aloft, especially since Jerry is keenly attuned to the minorities that populate his Long Island community. Jerry’s sexual relationships with various women of color demonstrate that he does not necessarily wish to maintain some vision of white purity, nor does he abhor the possibility that a person of color might own property within the seemingly exclusive suburbs in which the majority of the characters reside. Aloft’s construction of white identity and white exclusion functions with much more subtlety. Jerry, as a “sensitive” Italian American, epitomizes the complexities of race and race consciousness in the post–civil rights moment. He knows precisely what to say to appease certain parties but does not necessarily comprehend why he must say it. In this respect, his failure to acknowledge his own white privilege and its place within a wider spectrum exposes the inferential racism operating within the novel. A discreet form of white supremacy is also at work, which emerges in a paradox: Jerry espouses multicultural viewpoints while overlooking his elite status as a white, upwardly mobile subject. Jerry views his suburb as a location that cannot remain homogeneous, yet at the same time, he reads the racial and ethnic subjects as anomalous bodies, potentially subject to being expunged. Jerry’s narration constantly asks: how do these minorities fit into the frame of a changing Long Island suburbia? He does not ask the same of the white characters. Instead, in Jerry’s view, whiteness becomes the norm against which all racial Others are measured. Jerry’s supposedly more self-conscious narration does not suggest that he understands how suburban racial Others must contend with the very social fabric undergirding the phalanx of Long Island tract homes and upper-middle-class living, for which whiteness is a dominating racial force. Jerry focuses on the singular; that is, he situates his life within a liberal individualism that absolves him of personal guilt and from fully confronting his white privilege.
Jerry’s observations paint the Long Island suburb within a multiracial paradigm, but his insights still fail to point out how whiteness remains his universal point of reference. While criticism on Aloft is still relatively sparse, the literary critic Mark Jerng provides useful methodological springboards for expanding the critical conversation on the novel. Jerng employs phenomenology to demonstrate how Lee uses Jerry’s perception to establish the normative and the foreign, a perception that always orients Jerry at a racial center, while minorities orbit him as deviant bodies (“Nowhere in Particular”). Whereas Jerry positions himself within the lens of a universalizing gaze, those who cannot conform to that gaze are denoted as particular—different and potentially strange. My own argument draws some inspiration from Jerng’s approach, as formulations of whiteness within the novel are typically depicted as a subject position against which all other characters might be compared. Yet I consider the paradigms of universality and particularity not through phenomenological approaches but through the aforementioned critical race theories, which argue that racial inequality can be advanced through the tactical deployment of liberal individualism. In other words, whiteness can be both universalized and particularized in different narrative instances that cover over the systemic nature of racial inequality. Aloft plays with both poles of whiteness, in the sense that Jerry’s gaze occasionally demonstrates an expansiveness to its scope but nevertheless finds its grounding within the white upper-middle-class and segregated Long Island suburbs he knows best.
The novel’s opening sets up the importance of narrative perspective quite clearly as Jerry pilots a private plane. In this instance, Jerry’s distance above the earth provides an entry into what is supposed to be first-person narration, in which Jerry is consistently a part of the story he is telling. However, in the following passage, the narration seems to border on a third-person viewpoint, as Jerry does not reveal his narratorial “I” in his observations: “There is a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning in their cul-de-sac hoops, and then, too, in the flat roofs of the shopping mall buildings, with their shiny metal circuitry of HVAC housings and tubes” (1). The altitude flattens out the landscape, providing Jerry with a panoramic view of the communities below. This opening vista embodies the quintessential fantasy of upper-middle-class American suburbia, replete with air-conditioning, the requisite commercial districts, and the immaculate landscaping. Here, we must carefully attend to the repeated phrase “from up here,” a vantage point that allows Jerry to escape and ruminate on landscapes that look aesthetically pleasing, if only because they are reduced to pleasantly illuminated, geometrically shaped objects, whether these are “flat roofs,” “tubes,” or “simple, square houses” (1). The insularity of Jerry’s solo flying expeditions is further augmented by the “light reflecting” off the asphalt terrain and “shiny metal circuitry” (1). In a certain sense, while the scene is cast in this romanticized glow, Jerry idealizes a form of partial blindness. The description of a “mysterious, runelike cipher” implies that the language of suburbia requires decoding and cannot be translated from so far above the earth. One wonders, though, whether Jerry wishes to unlock the linguistic intricacy of the space below him. If there is a central mystery, it emerges directly from the space of Long Island tract housing and shopping malls. His observation that the landscapes look to be “fretted over by a persnickety florist god” (1) reflects a simplistic view of the labor that would have gone into the making of this suburban space. This moment is rather ironic, as readers will find out that Jerry has worked in the construction business for many years. That is, he should understand how much physical toil goes into the maintenance of any space, but he ignores it here in favor of his fanciful viewpoint.
Jerry’s plane flight continues to reveal his feelings concerning difference within Long Island. In contrast to the suburban perfection he views from above, Jerry admits to the cracks that surface when one moves closer: “And I know, too, from up here, that I can’t see the messy rest, none of the pedestrian, sea-level flotsam that surely blemishes our good scene, the casually tossed super-size Slurpies and grubby confetti of a million cigarette butts, the ever-creeping sidewalk mosses and weeds” (2–3). Jerry alerts his audience to the ways in which the homogeneity of suburban life cannot be maintained, impressing on them a sense of affiliation with his usage of the pronoun “our.” Thus, the opening scene establishes Aloft as essentially a monologic narration that masquerades as a conversational interplay. Jerry immediately understands the distortion of his gaze as he avoids these “blemishes.” Fearing judgment, he asks, “Is that okay?” (3) and, as if hearing a positive response from someone listening, corroborates with an “Okay” (3). Since the novel establishes itself more or less within a realist tradition, the narrative mode suggests a disruption: the narrator is always already aware that he is being judged, breaking the wall with his implied but unseen audience.