It seems a gross understatement to view Joyce Carol Oates’s ability to produce as nonpareil. Her prolific literary career has brought her readers cadres of impressively flawed characters, and her capacity to snake her way into the reader’s subconscious and entrench herself there is prodigious. Oates, more so than most writers, deals openly with issues of violence and intimacy – and the interconnectedness of the two – in many of her novels; Blonde and Foxfire immediately come to mind.  It is her jarringly candid demeanor when dealing with this volatile mixture that often interpellates the reader in profound ways.  She not only exposes the potency of the intimate relationships of her characters, but of her readers as well, and has the acute ability to make her readers feel utterly exposed. In Black Girl/White Girl, Oates once again snakes her way into the subconscious of the reader as she investigates the intricate entanglements of intimacy and violence, and the complex social psychology of race relations in post-civil rights era America. 

Genna Hewett-Meade, the privileged white daughter of a hippie mother and activist/lawyer father, and Minette Swift, the black daughter of an influential preacher, are freshmen at Schuyler College, a liberal arts college with a prestigious and progressive legacy.  From the very moment these girls meet, there is an abutting of two disparate and ultimately polarized worldviews.  Genna happens to be a descendant of the school’s wealthy founders, while Minette is a National Merit Scholar from Washington, D.C.  Genna’s parents are ex-hippies and political agitators who are emotionally distant, and generally absent from her life, leaving her without any real understanding of the nuances of relationships.  Minette’s family is tight-knit, open, devoutly religious, and solidly committed to each other.  Genna is self-effacing and eager to please, while Minette strives to differentiate herself fully from her peers as morally and spiritually superior.

The ostensible purpose of the novel as put forth by Genna is to launch an investigation into the death of Minette Swift, who dies a tragically premature death just shy of her nineteenth birthday while at Schuyler College.  Genna’s intention as “author” is to expose the whole truth surrounding Minette’s death, and to explain the curious circumstances of Genna’s own alleged complicity in it.  As Genna intones several times throughout the novel, “I was the one to have saved her, yet I did not.” 

The girls have a tenuous, fragile relationship. Genna’s sanctimonious parents have inculcated in her an intense fetishization of black culture, and her attempts to befriend Minette border on the fanatic.  It is a combination of Genna’s sense of white privilege and concomitant white liberal guilt, and an endless need to placate her aggressively anti-establishment father, that engender such a passionate obsession in becoming a significant part of Minette’s life.  It is clear that Genna is pursuing something much larger than friendship; it is the hope of diminishing her status as white and privileged.  For claiming a young black girl as a friend would represent (at least in the eyes of the Meade family) a true disavowal of white privilege.  Genna’s insistence throughout the book on how she will “make Minette like her” becomes more of a political objective than a personal one. Minette, aloof, disinterested, and diffident, rebukes Genna’s repeated advances through evasive, cryptic responses.

The true brilliance of Oates’s novel emerges in the girls’ interactions. Oates’s salient and introspective social commentary examines the racial anxieties of the post-civil rights era and exposes the hypocrisies of white liberalism’s savior complex.  Genna’s obsession with Minette’s blackness, or what she views as a demonstrated lack thereof, becomes another central motivation for Genna’s pursuit of Minette. Through Genna’s myopic eyes, Minette emerges as a young black woman who “needs” the solace of a white confidante to access and expose her blackness.  Genna, who claims to “know” black culture because she grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Louis Armstrong, is puzzled by Minette’s lack of black cultural capital and her seeming refusal to “act black.”  Here Oates provocatively taps into the tumultuous landscape of the American unconscious and pointedly exposes how monolithic constructions of race and racial communities hinder social relations and incite racial anxieties.  Genna’s repeated attempts to befriend Minette eventually engender a slippage in their identities, one that does not adhere to the easy, hackneyed motif of the self-effacing teenage girl looking for a way to define herself.  Rather, it points to a complex slippage in the convoluted social categories of black girl/white girl referenced in the title.  This dimension of their friendship is Oates’s most poignant creation.

As Minette becomes the target of several racist attacks, Genna’s behavior becomes more erratic and her narration increasingly less focused.  Her family life is slowly unraveling in the periphery, and her desperate urge for acceptance from Minette has become an acute concern, one she is willing to go to great lengths to satisfy.  As the school launches investigations into the racist attacks, Genna refuses to aid the investigations. While her motives are numerous – among them, a fear that Minette will permanently disable their tenuous links for fear of over-exposure, and also a fierce desire to protect Schuyler College and its progressive legacy – Genna’s true loyalties seem to lie with her absent father and his propagandist and truculent political philosophies.  Genna’s ultimate fear is that the increasingly diaphanous veil of philanthropy and do-goodery shielding white liberalism’s – and her father’s – pretensions will be conspicuously removed if she admits what she knows.   

Overall, the novel is one of Oates’s more provocative forays into discussions of racial tensions and anxieties, and a salient examination of the social roots of racial violence.  The twist in the third part of the book, however, leaves something to be desired.  Oates’s conclusion feels rushed and simplistic, and when the “actual” text of the novel is exposed, Minette Swift seems nothing more than a footnote in the lives of Genna and her father.  While both girls have their own subplots developed throughout the story, they remain somewhat obscured by Oates’s need to create and sustain an atmosphere of intrigue.  Only Genna’s subplot ever actually rises above subtextual levels of inference and authorial insinuation, and the centralizing of Genna’s subplot tragically shortchanges Minette and her story.  Oates could have done something wonderful with this text, but she ultimately obfuscates and undermines the issue of racial anxiety through her drastic upheaval of the novel and its intended project.