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epilogue Jim Crow today When Jim Crow Is but Should Not Be As racial dynamics have shifted over the course of the post–civil rights era,so too does the work of the neo–segregation narrative.Today,pronouncements of a postrace era are increasingly entering mainstream acceptance, especially following the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first (biracial) black president.A postrace era requires a clearly demarcated race era to precede it, which is the latest manifestation of the consistent foil of neo–segregation narratives: racial progress narratives that announce clean breaks from a racially tainted past. In Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), the unquestionable backwardness of minstrelsy, darkies, and segregation artifacts provides a language to articulate modern-day racial protest. Specifically, the protagonist expresses exasperated rage that marketable depictions of African Americans fail to speak to the full register of his (and others’) experiences. The protagonist,writer Thellonius “Monk”Ellison,fumes at the blockbuster success of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto: “The reality of popular culture was nothing new.The truth of the world landing on me daily,or hourly, was nothing I did not expect.But this book was a real slap in the face.It was like strolling through an antique mall,feeling good,liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating,banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars. 3 million dollars.”1 For post–Jim Crow subjects such as Thellonius, the obvious ridiculousness of segregation’s cardboard caricatures and racist stereotypes can clarify more elusive race politics today. Still, Erasure isn’t a neo–segregation narrative because Everett imports segregation’s artifacts into the contemporary moment . This study, however, concentrates on literature that does the inverse: returns to the Jim Crow era with one eye on the historical record and one on the present. Neo–segregation narratives consciously induce what I call temporal dysphoria because we encounter Jim Crow today when we think—and know!—he should be then.There is a strange contradiction when contemporary writers return to a Jim Crow period to comment on post–civil rights concerns: the simplicity of Jim Crow thinking is simultaneously absurd and useful. A 156 Epilogue good parting example of a neo–segregation narrative to pair with Everett’s novel is Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999). Whitehead returns to the Jim Crow era in a northern city (probably New York during the Harlem Renaissance) as he playfully delivers an uplift narrative of the most literal sort: a story about elevator inspection. The novel’s protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is the city’s second black and first black female elevator inspector. She is an intuitionist,adhering to a philosophy that is on the wane and much derided by the dominant school of elevator inspection,the empiricists.Over the course of the novel, she is drawn into the high-stakes mystery of the two warring camps, ultimately discovering that her chosen philosophy of intuitionism was crafted as a lark.A man passing as white at the prestigious elevator institute invented intuitionism to hoodwink white people. Whitehead’s novel is an exemplary neo–segregation narrative for the postrace era because it addresses race indirectly,inviting readers to map racial schools onto intuitionism and empiricism without confirming that that is the book’s underlying subject.More so than Uncle Teddy in Getting Mother’s Body,Whitehead gets us to think about race by not thinking about it directly. He peppers his novel with just enough references to segregation, uplift, and integration to offer a meditation on the betterment of African Americans that resonates with post–civil rights concerns about the limits of desegregation and the philosophy of integration.The Jim Crow era,and contemporary readers’ideas about it, holds the power to clarify race relations when racism has gone underground.To wit,in another of Whitehead’s novels, John Henry Days,the black male protagonist insists upon Jim Crow’s presence today in a particularly revealing way. “‘This isn’t Mississippi in the fifties, J.,’ One Eye says, cocking his head. ‘It’s always Mississippi in the fifties,’ J. answers.”2 Like Jim Crow,“Mississippi”is overdetermined in the cultural imagination, whether generic,as a shorthand for deep race segregation,or specific,such as the murder of Emmett Till. But the exact referent is effaced in the literary text, probably because “Mississippi”needs no elaboration. As Nina Simone belted in 1963, “Everybody knows...

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