Practicality, Idealism, and Race Theme Analysis

Fences explores the different views some of its characters have about what’s feasible, achievable, and practical or life-sustaining with regard to career ambitions and future goals. Troy disapproves of the livelihoods to which his sons aspire, considering them to be idealistic dreams compared to what he views as more practical trades. Troy’s disapproval, especially in Cory’s case, is largely informed by his own experience growing up black. Cory’s youth—his experience growing up in a different period of history—however, affords him a broader view of what the future might hold in store for him, of the careers open to him as a young black male. Consequently, he has a different understanding of what qualify as practical, viable ambitions.

Troy doesn’t think Cory should pursue a future in football, since he believes that black people are prohibited from success in the white-dominated world of sports. Troy’s past in the sharecropping South, and his experience as a talented baseball player whose career could never take flight because of discrimination, have all informed his sense of black life and opportunity in the world around him. It’s this background which makes Troy perceive Cory’s ambition as idealistic, and not grounded in reality or practical. Further, while Lyons says music is something essential to life, Troy sees Lyons’ lifestyle as shirking the responsibility and hard work Troy associates with a man’s ‘proper’ profession. Though Lyons says he values being a musician for a value intrinsic to it, Troy thinks only about money, finding Lyons’s ambitions to be impractical. Lyons lifestyle fails to adequately provide for him, but he nonetheless continues to pursue music over a more stable trade.

Does Fences suggest that the idealism of Cory or Lyons is a better choice than Troy’s practicality? While Wilson ultimately writes Troy’s existence off at the end of the play with an aura of failure, dissatisfaction, anger, and betrayal, it might be too simplistic to say that this is a gesture of critique—that Wilson condemns Troy’s practicality altogether. Further, the fact that his sons appear to be more compassionate, level-headed, and hopeful as human beings are not sufficient grounds to say that Wilson favors their idealism over Troy’s practicality. Rather than taking a stance on either, Wilson seems more concerned with showing us how the social world of white power and racism, and how it changes and evolves through time, forms its characters’ perceptions of idealism and practicality—how, to a great extent, especially as disenfranchised black men, Troy and his sons’ perceptions of idealism and practicality are molded by the white power outside and around them.

Troy’s practicality, informed by his sense of failure at the hands of racial discrimination, ultimately leads him to become an embittered man who withholds affection from those around him, and who cannot see past his own horizon when it comes to thinking about his sons’ futures. But Wilson perhaps wants to show us that people like Troy exist because an unjust world has hurt and formed them, and that the pain which racism inflicts on such people gets recycled into the generation they raise. Wilson doesn’t seem to want to delegitimize Troy as a human being by implying that his practicality is something which he personally invented—rather, he wants to educate a white audience, and give a voice to a black audience, about the suffering which exists in people like Troy, why it exists, and how it is passed on.

Similarly, Cory and Lyons are not treated by Wilson as a choice in an ethical decision between idealism versus practicality, but rather as two views of a racially divided world informed by a different, more progressive but still grossly regressive social atmosphere—as the two have different personal pasts than Troy. By pitting Troy against Cory and Lyons, Wilson again shows us how white power not only separates itself from blackness, but also separates and divides blacks themselves. While not picking a side, Wilson positions the play from the standpoint of a more historical perspective about how these sides are formed, and how they shape future generations, at the same time that he grounds that higher perspective in a family’s everyday lived experience.