Racism and Individuality  Theme Analysis

Blues for Mister Charlie represents people with racist attitudes as unable to see other human beings’ individuality: instead, it shows how racism causes people to perceive others through stereotyped, racialized fantasies of their own. Thus, people with racist attitudes are on a fundamental level alienated both from other people and from the truth. This representation of racism and individuality is clearest in the play’s depiction of Lyle Britten, a poor white store owner living in an unnamed U.S. Southern town in the 1960s. Lyle sees everyone—white and Black—through racist fantasies of white supremacy and Black dangerousness. Anxious and insecure about his own masculinity, he rapes Willa Mae, the young wife of an older Black man, subsequently conducts a dubiously consensual affair with her, and brags that she told him he was better in bed than any Black man. When the woman’s husband confronts him, Lyle murders the husband and claims it was self-defense because the man was “crazy” and dangerous. Lyle sees Black women as sexual targets, and Black men not as people who might care about their wives’ well-being, but as potentially violent and dangerous sexual competitors. Lyle eventually murders another young Black man, Richard Henry, because Richard refuses to apologize to him or call him “sir”—that is, because Richard asserts his dignity as a human being rather than bowing to Lyle’s fantasies of white supremacy.

Lyle’s racist attitudes prevent him from seeing the individuality not only of Black people but also of white people, albeit with less murderous results: for example, he marries his wife Jo not because he loves her but because he sees her as an acceptable racial type, a chaste “white virgin” whom he is sure will be faithful to him. He does not know—and displays no curiosity about—her inner life. Moreover, Lyle really only thinks of himself as a “white man”—barely a particular individual himself. In the play, then, racism leaves racist white people like Lyle stranded in a fantasy world and unable to connect with others or themselves on a human level.