Confusion in a dream deferred: Context and culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1998 by Kodat, Catherine Gunther

As this poignant passage indicates, Hansberry recognized her class privilege and wished to overcome it; but, as Baldwin obliquely acknowledges, her critics found traces of that past in her work. Perhaps the most stinging and well-known critique-one leveled three years after her death but which picked up and amplified complaints made during her lifetime-appears in Harold Cruse's chapter "Lorraine Hansberry" in his 1967 study The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in which he describes Hansberry as "the daughter of a prosperous, upper middleclass family who owned thirteen slum properties in Chicago's Negro district" and as a prime example of the "leftwing accommodation to middle-class ideology" (266, 267). Cruse's larger target in this chapter-indeed,in his entire studyis the abandonment of the black poor and working class by the racial leadership in favor of a strategy of assimilation into the ranks of a cultural elite; Lorraine Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun emerge as exhibits A and B in this overall critique. Cruse writes:

when Raisin burst on the scene with a Negro star, a Negro director plus a young Negro woman playwright everybody on Broadway was startled and very apprehensive about what this play might say. What obviously elated the drama critics was the very relieving discovery that what the publicity buildup actually heralded was not the arrival of belligerent forces from across the color line to settle some long-standing racial accounts on stage, but a good old-fashioned,home-spun saga of some good working-class folk in pursuit of the American Dream . . . in their fashion. And what could possibly be thematically objectionable about that? . . . Only because it was

about Negroes was this play acceptable. . . If this play-which is so "American" that many whites did not consider it a "Negro play"-had ever been staged by white actors it would be judged second-rate .... what all the so-called perceptive critics missed was that, from the very real standpoint of Negro urban class sociology, the author deliberately chose the wrong family for the theme. (278-79; emphasis in original)

Cruse's notion of a white production of Hansberry's play is improbable-the crucial gesture of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association becomes unimaginable in such a context-but other aspects of his critique merit attention. In choosing "the wrong family," Cruse argues, Hansberry's play implies that racial discrimination results primarily from a failure to accommodate black class striving. Once whites realize that blacks, too, can be middle class, racism will melt away-an integration tactic that, while plausible for the highly trained and welleducated black middle class, will not work nearly so smoothly for the semiskilled, partially-educated poor and working class.14 Thus Cruse dismisses the Youngers as "atypical of poor families from the South . . . carefully tidied up . . . as good, hardworking, upright, decent, moral, psychologically uncomplicated ghetto folk." He notes that there are "no numbers-runners in sight, no bumptiously slick, young 'cats' from downstairs sniffing Mama Younger's pretty daughter on the corner, no shyster preachers hustling Mama into the fold, no fallen women, etc.," and concludes that: