Metonymy in Black and White: Shelby Steele's Revelatory Racial Tropes

ABSTRACT Inspired by Henry Louis Gates's observation that race is “the ultimate trope,” the author analyzed the metonymies used in an essay on American black–white race dynamics: Shelby Steele's “The Age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual.” Steele used tropes that unintentionally yet convincingly reveal a worldview at odds with his socio-political self-identification and his stated positions. While Steele's essay as a whole ostensibly calls for an end to programs treating people as masses rather than individuals, his tropes belie his overt arguments, reflecting an exceedingly binary, essentializing, and reductive vision.

摘要：受亨利·路易斯·盖茨关于种族是“终极比喻”这一观点的启发，作者分析了一篇关于美国黑白种族动态的文章中所使用的转喻：谢尔比·斯蒂尔的《白人愧疚的时代与黑人个体的消失》。斯蒂尔使用的比喻无意中却令人信服地揭示了一种与他的社会政治自我认同以及他所陈述的立场相悖的世界观。虽然斯蒂尔的文章总体上表面上呼吁终止将人作为群体而非个体对待的项目，但他的比喻与他的公开论点相悖，反映出一种极其二元、本质化和简化的视角。