Zink’s marveling description of what blackness looks like implies that it could welcome anyone. She draws a phenotypic loophole through which a sympathetic impostor or a straight-up cynic can pass.

津克对黑人长相的精彩描述暗示了这一族是欢迎所有人加入的。她设置了一个显型漏洞，让怀有好感的冒充者或干脆就是犬儒的人都能通过检测。

Each of these books wrestles with the fact of race while trying to present it as mutable, constructed, obscuring. In Beatty’s novel, a young black farmer in modern Los Angeles reluctantly takes on a vulgar former TV minstrel star as his slave. Blackness, according to this book, is as much a scam as it is a cultural identity; the undercurrents of tragedy keep lapping at the harbor of farce. Row’s novel is also a satire, but an eerily calm one in which a white man has ‘‘racial reassignment’’ surgery and becomes black. Row, who like Zink is white, takes guilt to an astounding allegorical extreme: The surest cure for white oppression is to eliminate whiteness. Whatever else is going on with Dolezal psychologically, you can read into her proud reassignment a sense of shame.

所有这些书都在克服种族的现实，同时也表明种族是构建而成的，易变而模糊。在比蒂的小说中，一个现代洛杉矶的年轻黑人农民，拒绝让一个粗俗的电视黑脸秀明星当他的奴隶。在这本书里，黑是一种文化身份，也是一个骗局；悲剧的潜流不断拍击着滑稽的港湾。耶斯·罗的小说也是讽刺作品，但却有着让人毛骨悚然的冷静，一个白人男性进行了“种族重指定”手术，成为黑人。和津克一样也是白人的罗，将负罪感推向一个寓言性的惊人极致：要消解白人压迫，最有效的办法是消灭所谓白人。不管多尔扎尔的内心是怎么想的，从她骄傲的种族重指定选择中，你能感觉到一丝羞耻。

But racial transgression works the other way too. ‘‘Hamilton’’ is a musical biography about the very white, very dead Alexander Hamilton, in which most of the cast is ‘‘other,’’ including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s Nuyorican creator and star. Some of its audacity stems from the baldness of its political project: In changing the races of the founding fathers from white to brown, it pushes back against the currents of racial appropriation. It also infuses the traditional melodies of the American musical with so many genres of hip-hop and R & B, sometimes in a single number, that the songs themselves become something new. Political debates are staged as rap battles. Daveed Diggs’s Thomas Jefferson becomes the best good thing that never happened at the Source Awards. Artistically, Miranda has created a great night out. Racially, the show tags the entertainment industry status quo with color. It’s obviously musical theater. But damn if it’s not graffiti too.

然而种族忤逆也是可以反过来的。传记音乐剧《汉密尔顿》主人公是一个死了几百年、白得不能再白的白人，但剧中演员却大多是“其他”种族，包括本剧主创、主演林-马努艾尔·米兰达(Lin-Manuel Miranda)，一个波多黎各裔美国人。如此大胆的安排，一定程度上是因为它并不打算掩盖自己的政治计划：通过将国父的肤色从白变成棕，来抵制当前的种族挪用潮流。它还将传统的美国音乐剧旋律与许许多多的嘻哈乐和节奏布鲁斯流派混作一团，有时在一首歌里就能尽数呈现，使歌曲本身成了某种新的东西。政客的辩论被设计成说唱对战。戴维伊德·迪格斯(Daveed Diggs)饰演的托马斯·杰弗逊，是Source杂志大奖（嘻哈乐重要奖项。——译注）上见不到的杰作。从艺术上，米兰达创造了一个美妙夜晚。种族上，这部戏为娱乐工业的现状增添了一点颜色。它显然是音乐剧。但说它是涂鸦亦无不妥。

Naturally, this new era has also agitated a segment of the populace that is determined to scrub the walls. That, presumably, is where Donald Trump comes in: as the presidential candidate for anyone freaked out by the idea of a show like ‘‘Hamilton.’’ Trump is the pathogenic version of Obama, filling his supporters with hope based on a promise to rid the country of change. This incarnation of Trump appeared not long after Obama’s election, determined to disprove the new president’s American citizenship. On Trump’s behalf, an entire wing of conservatism — the so-called birthers — devoted itself to the removal of a mask that Obama was never wearing. Part of Trump’s appeal is his illusion of authenticity. His blustering candor has currency in a landscape of android candidates. Yet his magnetism resides in paranoia, the fear that since Obama’s election ushered in this shifting, unstable climate of identity, the country has been falling apart.

这个新时代，自然也惹怒了一部分一心想抹杀它的民众。这大概就是唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)的切入点：作为一个总统候选人，他代表的是那些被《汉密尔顿》这样的事物吓着的人。特朗普是病原版的奥巴马，他的承诺是让这个国家免遭任何改变，凭借这一点，他给他的支持者带去了希望。特朗普是在奥巴马当选后不久道成肉身的，他一心要证明这位新任总统没有美国国籍。在特朗普的带领下，整个保守主义阵营——所谓的出生地质疑者——一心要摘下一个奥巴马从来没戴过的面具。一定程度上，特朗普的吸引力在于他在幻想一种不存在的真。在一个个机器般的候选人中间，他那大呼小叫的率真是有市场的。然而他的魅力源自妄想狂，源自奥巴马的当选所制造的恐慌，人们担心在这场动荡不定的身份变革中，国家会轰然倒塌。

It’s a paranoia that pop culture captured first: In the last six years, Hollywood has provided a glut of disaster spectacles, armageddon scenarios and White House sackings. But the USA Network’s ‘‘Mr. Robot,’’ which ended its first season last month, might have gotten at that sense of social collapse best. Created by Sam Esmail, an Egyptian-American, the show pits technology against the economy and its unstable protagonist against himself. The plot concerns a group of anarchist hackers conspiring to topple a corporation; with it go the stability of world markets and everybody’s financial debt. But it’s also a mystery about the identity of its protagonist, a mentally ill, morphine-addicted hacker named Elliot. We think he’s obeying the commands of the show’s title character, the head of a hacktivist outfit, but it turns out that he has been commanding himself all along. Significant parts of this world are figments of his delusion. Elliot is at least two people. Some of the dark excitement of this show is that he might be even more.

流行文化首先捕捉到了这种妄想：过去六年里，好莱坞呈上了无数灾难奇观、末世悲景和白宫浩劫。但在对社会崩塌的表现上，上月刚结束第一季的USA电视网(USA Network)剧集《黑客军团》(Mr. Robot)也许是最有力的。这部由埃及裔美国人萨姆·艾斯美尔(Sam Esmail)创制的剧集让科技和经济站在了对立面，也让反复无常的主人公成为自己的敌人。剧中一个无政府主义黑客团体密谋颠覆一个大公司；全球市场因此陷入动荡，所有人的债务被一笔勾销。然而该剧主人公——患有精神病症、吗啡成瘾的黑客埃利奥特——也是一个身份成疑的人。我们以为他是在执行剧名所示人物“Mr. Robot”（机器人先生）的命令，那是一个黑客活动团体的领导人，然而后来发现，埃利奥特一直在自行其是。这个世界有相当一部分是他凭空臆想出来的。埃利奥特至少是两个人。而这部剧的其中一个黑暗看点在于，可能还不止两个。

‘‘Mr. Robot’’ is worst-of-times TV, reflecting a mood of menacing instability. Over the course of its 10 episodes, almost no one was who they appeared to be. A straight married man seemed to think nothing of his sleeping with a gay work underling (and neither did his wife). A character who seemed, to my eyes at least, to be a transgender woman at some point appeared as a conventional man. Was that a coming out? A going in? Both? This isn’t a show I watched for what was going to happen but for who people were going to turn into, or who they wanted to turn out to be. It’s a show about the way your online profile can diverge from your real-life identity, yes, but also the way you can choose a self or a self can choose you.

《黑客军团》是讲述“最糟糕的时代”的电视剧，反映了一种令人恐慌的动荡气氛。十集的剧情铺陈下来，几乎所有人都是表里不一的。一个已婚异性恋男性，对自己跟男同下属上床的事似乎完全不以为意（他妻子也是这样）。一个看起来——至少在我看来——是跨性别女性的角色，突然以寻常男性形象出现。这算是出柜？入柜？两者皆有？这部剧看的不是将发生什么事，而是人将会变成什么，或想变成什么。它的确点明了我们的网上形象跟真实生活中的身份有怎样的差异，但同时，它还关乎我们的自我选择，或被自我选择。

There’s also the choice to ignore the matter of identity — until, of course, it starts to aggravate your complacency. Not far into the flap over Dolezal, another alarming story took over the news, a story that challenged the myths white America tells itself about progress. This story was about Atticus Finch, the protagonist of Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ Atticus single-handedly fought racism in the fictitious Alabama town of Maycomb, and he became a window through which we could see a version of tolerance, someone holy enough to put on stained glass or money. But in ‘‘Go Set a Watchman,’’ the sequel to ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’’ published in July, Atticus was given a scandalous status update: He had been aged into a racist.

无视身份问题也是一个选择——当然，前提是不要到了加剧你的自满的程度。多尔扎尔的事还没平息，另一则警世故事又闹了起来，这一次，故事挑战得是美国白人自说自话的那一套进步迷思。故事主人公是哈珀·李(Harper Lee)的1960年经典小说《杀死一只反舌鸟》(To Kill a Mockingbird)人物阿提克斯·芬奇(Atticus Finch)。在虚构的阿拉巴马州梅康镇，阿提克斯单枪匹马对抗种族主义，他成了一面窗户，让我们看到了宽容的一种表现形式，一个足够做成教堂彩色玻璃或印到钞票上的圣人。但在七月出版的续篇《设立守望者》(Go Set a Watchman)中，阿提克斯的事迹出现了一次不堪入目的转折：随着年龄增大，他成了一个种族主义者。

I can’t recall the last time the attitudes of a single fictional character led the national news. But there was bigoted old Atticus, on the front pages, being discussed on cable. One of the most iconic white antiracists had grown fond of white supremacy. It raised an uncomfortable question: If you had identified with the original Atticus Finch, did his Archie Bunkerization make a racist out of you too? The public hand-wringing was a perverse refreshment because, even if only for a few days, it left white people dwelling on race as intensely as nonwhite people. This new Atticus was a betrayal of white liberal idealism, feeding a suspicion that that idealism was less than absolute — that it could suddenly, randomly turn against the people it purported to help.

在我印象里，还没有哪个小说人物的态度能成为全国性新闻。偏执的老阿提克斯上了报纸头条，有线电视节目也在谈论他。家喻户晓的白人反种族主义者，变成了白人至上主义的信徒。这就带来一个令人如坐针毡的问题：如果说原来的阿提克斯·芬奇曾经引起你的共鸣，那这个阿契·邦克尔(Archie Bunker)化的阿提克斯，会不会又唤醒了你心里的一个种族主义自我呢？这场公众焦虑是对思绪的一次反常的重启，因为现在连白人也要像非白人一样，满脑子想着种族问题了——哪怕只是持续那么几天。这个新阿提克斯是白人自由理想主义的叛徒，给那些认为理想主义并非铁板一块的人壮了声势——在他们看来，理想主义会突然地、随机地把矛头转向那些它号称要帮助的人。

It was almost as if Lee knew, in 1957, about the mood of the country in 2015 — about the way a series of dead black men and women would further cleave apart the country; about the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a young white supremacist in a South Carolina church, and the ensuing debate over the Confederate flag; about the fear of inevitable, inexorable racial, gender and sexual evolution; about the perceived threats to straight-white-male primacy by Latino immigrants, proliferating Spanish, same-sex marriage, female bosses and a black president.

哈珀·李仿佛在1957年就已经知道，这个国家到了2015年会处在怎样的气氛中——她知道一系列黑人男女的死亡事件会进一步加剧种族对立；知道一个年轻的白人至上主义者在一座南卡罗莱拉州教堂里屠杀了九名黑人教徒，随后还引发一场关于邦联旗的争论；知道不可避免、不可阻挡的种族、性别和性革命；知道拉美移民、日渐普及的西班牙语、同性婚姻、女性上司以及一个黑人总统给异性恋白人男性权力构成的明显威胁。

The yearning to transcend race keeps coming up against the bedrock cultural matter of separateness. But the tectonic plates of the culture keep pushing against one another with greater, earthquaking force. The best show in our era about that quake — about the instability of identity and the choosing of a self — has been ‘‘Key & Peele.’’ For five seasons, in scores of sketches, two biracial men, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, became different women and different men of different ethnicities, personalities and body types. They were two of the best actors on television, hailing from somewhere between the lawlessness of improv comedy and the high-impact emotionalism of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman, zillion-character plays. ‘‘Key & Peele’’ granted nearly every caricature a soul.

超越种族的渴望，与族类有别的文化核心不断发生冲突。然而，文化的构造板块正在以越来越强烈的、地动山摇的力量相互碰撞着。这场地震，这种身份的不稳定性和对自我的选择，在《Key & Peele》中有着最完美的呈现。纪甘-迈克尔·吉(Keegan-Michael Key)和乔丹·皮尔(Jordan Peele)，两个有双重种族身份的男人，在五季的小品剧集中，变成了各种不同族裔、人格和体型的女人和男人。他们是当今最杰出的电视演员，风格介于毫无章法的即席喜剧和炽烈的安妮·迪佛·史密斯(Anna Deavere Smith)式感情主义一人多角剧之间。《Key & Peele》给几乎所有夸张形象注入了一个灵魂。

The show started as a commentary on the hilarious absurdity of race, but it never fully escaped the pernicious reality of racism. The longer it ran, the more melancholy it became, the more it seethed. In the final episode, its anger caught up with its fancifulness and cheek, exploding in an old-timey musical number called ‘‘Negrotown,’’ which opens with a black man (Key) being arrested by a white cop one night while walking down a dark alleyway. He says he’s innocent of any wrongdoing and asks why he’s being arrested, intensifying the cop’s anger. Entering the police cruiser, he hits his head on the car door. Suddenly, a homeless man (Peele) arrives on the scene and offers to take the black guy off the cop’s hands. The cop gratefully acquiesces.

该剧是以评论种族问题中令人捧腹的荒诞性起家，但也从未回避种族主义的严峻现实。随着时间推移，剧集的气氛变得越来越阴郁，也越来越愤怒。在大结局中，这种愤怒混合了它的怪想和俚俗，在一个老式歌舞片片段http://https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg58d8opQKA中全面爆发，它的开头是一个黑人男子（由吉饰演）在黑暗的巷子里走着，结果被一个白人警察逮捕。他说他没有任何不法行为，问警察为什么逮捕他，这煽起了警察的火气。在进入警车时，警察把他的头往车门上撞了一下。突然，一个乞丐（由皮尔饰演）出现，提出把这个黑人从警察手里带走。警察万分感激地同意了。

Taking the disoriented man by the hand, the homeless guy leads him through an alley door. They find themselves on the threshold of a sunny neighborhood. The homeless guy is now dressed in a three-piece suit the color of pink grapefruit meat, and he begins to sing in a camped-up, zero-calorie Paul Robeson baritone about this new place, ‘‘where there ain’t no pain, ain’t no sorrow.’’ Black people in bright clothes are dancing in the streets, singing in giddy verse about the special virtues of their town: You can get a cab to pick you up, have a loan application approved, even wear a hoodie without getting shot. Plus: ‘‘There’s no stupid-ass white folks touching your hair or stealing your culture, claiming it’s theirs.’’

乞丐拉着这个晕乎乎的人走进巷子里的一扇门。转眼间，他们来到了一个阳光明媚的社区。乞丐此刻穿上了一身葡萄柚色三件套正装，开始用一种做作的、零卡路里的保罗·罗比逊(Paul Robeson)式男中音歌唱这片新天地，“这儿没痛苦，没悲伤。”黑人们身着色彩艳丽的衣服在街上起舞，用喜悦的辞句赞美他们的家园：在这里你伸手就可以打到车，申请贷款能得到批准，穿上卫衣都不会中枪。还有：“不会有傻头傻脑的白人来摸你的头发，把你的文化偷走，说成是他们的。”

But it’s clear from the start that the ‘‘neighborhood’’ is a studio backlot, and the dancers are costumed in the colors of Skittles, and their dancing involves a lot of grinning and spinning and stretching out their arms — shuffling. Black freedom looks like a white 1940s Hollywood director’s idea of it. At the end of the number, the dancers stand frozen with their arms raised in a black-power salute, as if waiting for someone to yell ‘‘cut.’’ No one does.

然而，从一开始就可以看出，这片“邻里”只是一个摄影棚置景，舞者的衣服是彩虹糖色的，他们在舞蹈中满脸堆笑，不断地旋转，伸展双臂——跳的是曳步舞。这片黑人世外桃源，似乎是一个1940年代好莱坞白人导演设想出来的。在歌曲的最后，高举双臂摆出“黑人力量”礼的舞者们静止不动，仿佛在等人喊“cut”。但一直没人喊。

The dream melts away, and we’re back with the guy being arrested, passed out on the ground. The cop starts shoving him into the cruiser. ‘‘I thought I was going to Negrotown,’’ he says.

梦想渐渐淡去，我们重新回到那人被逮捕的场景，他刚刚晕倒在地上。警察开始把他往车里塞。“我以为我要去黑鬼镇呢，”他说。

‘‘Oh, you are,’’ the cop replies, as the piano riff from the song starts to play and the car drives off.

“对啊，就是去那儿，”警察答道，在钢琴弹奏的副歌旋律中，警车开动起来。

The show left us with a dream of Edenic self-containment as the key to black contentment — a stunning contradiction of all its previous sketches. It was a rebuke to both racial integration and ghettoization. It split me open. I cried with laughter at the joke of this obviously fake place as a kind of heaven. I cried with sadness, because if you’re in Negrotown, you’re also in a special ring of hell.

这一段歌舞，给我们留下的是一场梦，梦中那伊甸园式的自我桎梏，成了通往黑人幸福的关键——这和该剧集此前的所有小品都是背道而驰的。它在同时对种族融合与隔离发起谴责。我被猛地撕开了。面对这个明明是假造的、天堂般的地方上演着的笑话，我笑着哭了起来。我的哭泣是悲切的，因为如果你在黑鬼镇，你同时也就落入了地狱中的某个特殊地带。

The bitterness of the sketch made me wonder if being black in America is the one identity that won’t ever mutate. I’m someone who believes himself to have complete individual autonomy, someone who feels free. But I also know some of that autonomy is limited, illusory, conditional. I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment. So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived.

这则小品的苦涩让我想到，“美国黑人”会不会是唯一一个永远不会变异的身份。我是一个认为自己有完全的个体自主权的人，一个感到自由的人。但我也知道，自主权中存在有限的、虚幻的、有条件的地方。从小到大我一直知道，不管我如何看待我的肤色，总会跟某些白人旁观者是存在分歧的，这样的事随时会发生。因此我有一种双重身份：我的身份，以及他人理解的身份。黑人的演化在相当程度上是被框限在白人容许的范围内的，而白人同时又不承认他们掌握着这种发放许可的权力。容许。要想改变这种共生关系，白人需要更清楚地认识到，他们的身份也存在他人理解的版本。

It could be that living with recycled conflict is part of the national DNA. Yet it’s also in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.

也许这个国家就是擅长忍受这种反复重现的冲突。与此同时，我们又有一种不断求变、求自我发现的天性。2012年出版的安德鲁·索罗门(Andrew Solomon)代表作《那些与众不同的孩子》(Far From the Tree)讲的是为人父母之道，以及孩子之间的差别，在书中，索罗门将身份分成了垂直与水平两种。决定前者的是通过基因和规范与父母共享的性格特征；而后者是由你跟父母不一样的性格特征和价值观决定的，有时候是因为基因变异，有时候是因为选择了另一个社交世界。书中许多故事的情感张力源于某种显著或极端的水平身份得不到爱或同情——比如同性恋、自闭症或严重的残疾。索罗门写的是在偏狭与疏离中的挣扎；是我们对固定的、世俗认可的身份的贪恋，以及不固定、不稳定的身份给我们带来的苦恼。

His insights about families apply to us as a country. We’re a vertical nation moving horizontally. We’re daring to erase the segregating boundaries, to obliterate oppressive institutions, to get over ourselves. Nancy Meyers knows it. Sam Esmail knows it. So, in his way, does Donald Trump. The transition should make us stronger — if it doesn’t kill us first.

他对家庭的洞察可以推演至作为一个国家的我们。我们是一个在水平方向移动的垂直国家。我们敢于消除隔离的界线，废除压迫性的制度，克服自以为是。南希·迈耶斯清楚这一点。萨姆·艾斯美尔也知道。连唐纳德·特朗普也以他自己的方式表明他知道。这场转变应该会让我们更强大——前提是不被它杀死。