Race and American Identity Theme Analysis

In The America Play, a black man known only as the Foundling Father makes a career out of impersonating Abraham Lincoln and charging people to pretend to assassinate him. By portraying black suffering in the context of a white narrative, Parks reveals how white people have capitalized on this suffering throughout history and emphasizes that black identity is an inalienable part of American identity. Ultimately, she argues that separating white and black narratives in history and art perpetuates white supremacy, and The America Play embodies the inevitable connection between black and white history in the United States.

The Foundling Father’s Lincoln impersonation is a clear metaphor for the oppression of African Americans. Because he guided the United States through the abolition of slavery, Lincoln’s presidency marks the official incorporation of black Americans into the nation, and he has become a symbol of the still-unrealized ideal of a racially equal America. Parks sees Lincoln as an “American” hero, in the term’s broadest sense, and the Foundling Father’s unmistakable resemblance to Lincoln shows how a truly “American” identity must be multiracial. But the Foundling Father’s trajectory is tragic: rather than embodying Lincoln’s heroism as an emancipator (by reciting the Great Man’s speeches, as he initially hopes to do), the Foundling Father only makes a living by letting white people assault him. First, he starts “inviting [people] to come and throw old food at him,” and later, he realizes that people will “pay a penny” (with Lincoln’s face on it) to reenact Lincoln’s assassination. In other words, white people are not interested in honoring an American hero represented by a black actor—they’re interested in ridiculing and murdering him. Parks shows this assassination scene over and over again, with a nonchalance that recalls acts of racial violence like lynching. This repetition evokes the perpetual and systemic nature of antiblack racism in the United States and illustrates how black people’s suffering has been converted into profit and entertainment throughout American history—including, potentially, for some audience members during this very play.

Beyond this Lincoln impersonation, Parks consistently puts black characters in positions usually reserved for white Americans to further challenge the separation of black and white American history and emphasize that American history belongs to all Americans. For example, the Foundling Father goes “out West” to build his fortune, and his wife Lucy and son Brazil follow. This is a clear reference to the importance of westward migration in American history, and specifically to the period of “Manifest Destiny” around the time of Lincoln’s presidency, when white settlers colonized Native American land in the western United States. The Foundling Father’s westward migration is clearly ironic because Manifest Destiny was a white supremacist ideology, but also shows how migration—whether as pioneers, immigrants, refugees, or slaves—unites Americans. Similarly, while Brazil and Lucy are searching for the Foundling Father, Lucy shouts out, “Sweet land of—?” but seemingly forgets what comes next, and Brazil replies, “Of liberty!” Their rather adverse circumstances suggest they are joking, and it is telling that Lucy strategically forgets the punchline: the promise of “liberty” is foundational to American identity, but it has always applied unequally to people of different races. Clearly, liberty has played a small, even forgettable, role in Lucy’s life as black woman.

Finally, the recurring motif of the Great Hole of History represents how black history and art are relegated to an inferior status. After visiting the original Great Hole, an amusement park full of historical reenactors, the Foundling Father is inspired to move West and dig his own “Great Hole,” where he performs his “Lincoln Act.” This “Great Hole of History” is also a metaphor for how the black experience of American history inspired Parks to write this play. For African Americans, history is a “Great Hole” in two senses. First, for several generations African Americans’ lives were largely defined by slavery, and before that, their histories are difficult to trace: there is a literal void or “Hole” in the narrative of history. Secondly, African Americans’ history and role in shaping contemporary America are often ignored in historical retellings, supplanted by the supposedly heroic deeds of (slaveholding) “Founding Fathers” and other white men. In most American schools, African American history is a neglected “Great Hole,” with the history of white people taught as the history of the nation, and black history either ignored or compartmentalized. Through the Foundling Father, Parks suggests that art (particularly theater) replicates this problem by portraying white stories as heroic and universal, while black stories—if they’re told at all—are segregated into a separate category of “minority art” and not taken seriously. This segregation lets white people “appreciate” black art without taking its lessons to heart, and thereby deny their role in the legacy of African American oppression. Indeed, the Foundling Father’s reenactment of racialized violence onstage suggests that this segregated model of storytelling turns theater into another way for white audiences to dominate and inflict violence on black people. More controversially, Parks also thinks this segregation prevents black people from defining themselves in terms beyond their history of oppression and slavery. The America Play shows that this doesn’t have to happen—instead, theater can tell a more complete, integrated, and accurate story of American identity that shows how black and white history are two sides of the same coin.

Who owns Abraham Lincoln’s story? Parks argues that all Americans do, and that it is not just morally wrong, but also historically inaccurate and socially counterproductive, to separate stories about black people and other minority groups from those about “America.” She argues for a hybrid, not hyphenated, identity that includes the experiences of all Americans. And she contends that separating art into categories according to race perpetuates white supremacy by relegating non-white artists to their own “Great Hole.” In short, The America Play is Parks’s attempt to tell a story about black America—which is to say, America as a whole—without letting blackness limit her narrative possibilities.