The Politics of Home in Lorraine

Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun 1

kristin l. matthews

Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun (1959) probes the racially charged
politics of home ownership in post World War II Southside Chicago.
Within the first two minutes of the drama, Walter Lee Younger reads
from the Chicago Tribune that white folks set off another bomb yesterday
(26), a topic of conversation raised four times in the short duration of the
play. While one feels the reverberations of the bombings throughout
Raisin, they are never discussed explicitly, suggesting both the volatility
of the issue and its commonplace nature at that time. In post-war
Chicago, bombings, demonstrations, and assaults on blacks attempting to
move east into predominantly white neighbourhoods were on the rise. As
Stephen Meyer notes in As Long As They Dont Move Next Door (2000), by
July 1946, there had been twenty-seven bombings and a demonstration
of five-thousand people to keep blacks out of a public housing project
(89 90). Between the years 1956 and 1958 alone, there were over 250
reported incidents of racial violence a total that included at least thirtyeight arson cases (Meyer 121). More often than not, however, resistance
to neighbourhood integration happened on a smaller scale, with blacks
being denied home loans, paying higher finance costs (if, indeed, they
received a loan), and facing federally supported racially restrictive zoning
ordinances and covenants.
It is well known that Hansberrys family was personally acquainted with
the violence inherent in property ownership in Chicago. In the 1930s, the
Hansberrys tried to move into a restricted area and faced vigilante violence, with Lorraine herself narrowly escaping being struck on the head
by a brick. Her fathers legal challenge to restrictive racial covenants that
attempted to prevent inharmonious racial groups from entering into
white neighbourhoods (Ritzdorf 283) went all the way to the Supreme
Court, and Mr. Hansberrys 1940 victory had great symbolic if not actual
meaning. Although Hansberrys case was won on a technicality, the
Chicago Defender claimed that Hansberry v. Lee pierced the iron band

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The Politics of Home in Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun

of restrictive covenants which has checked the eastward movement of the

Race on Chicagos South side (Waters). Nevertheless, twenty more years
of racially motivated violence in the Chicago area suggested that housing
was still a primary front on which the war of civil rights was to be waged
in the late 1950s/1960s. In Raisin, neighbour Mrs. Johnsons comment
upon hearing the Younger family has purchased a home in the all-white
Clybourne Park points towards the cultural assumption that violence
would continue: Lord I bet this time next month yalls names
will have been in the papers plenty NEGROES INVADE CLYBOURNE
PARK BOMBED! (102). And continue it did, bringing Martin Luther
King, Jr., himself to the battlefront in July of 1966, to nail on the door of
Chicagos City Hall his theses demanding non-discriminatory
real-estate practices, as well as increased job opportunities and political
representation reflective of Chicagos diverse population.
The historical context of Chicagos housing rights struggle plays a significant role in mapping out the primary tensions in A Raisin in the Sun. As
Hansberry famously noted in her interview with Studs Terkel, [N]ot only
is this a Negro family, specifically and definitely culturally, but its not
even a New York family or a southern Negro family. It is specifically a
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Southside Chicago [family] (Terkel 8). The literal home that Mama
Younger purchases in Clybourne Park mirrors her familys various
psycho-social struggles to attain, secure, and define a sense of place, or
home, in the face of systemic socio-economic racism in Southside
Chicago. Although Hansberry told Terkel her plays failing was its lack of
a central character, she immediately problematized her claim, thereby indicating a complex understanding of character, individuality, and community in relation to the struggle for civil rights. Hansberry notes, [W]hen
you start breaking rules, you may be doing it for a good reason, you may
find something else. And since people are able to hold on to the play and
become involved in a way that the central character is supposed to guarantee, then maybe you dont really need it (Terkel 13). By breaking dramaturgys unwritten rule that the play privilege a central character,
Hansberry finds something else: a pluralistic voice and social ethic.
While Beneatha Youngers desire to express herself is often played for
comic value, her line ultimately points towards the plays investigation of
the viability and vulnerability of the various homes occupied by the
Younger family in their attempts to find and express themselves. Indeed,
a close examination of Raisin presents a polyvocal portrait of the black
struggle for communal civil rights and individual determination. Written
prior to the civil rights movements zenith and subsequent fragmentation
into passive resistance, Black Power, Pan-Africanism, and black feminism
(among other groups), Raisin warns that discord and factionalism within
the movement can be as dangerous to the end-goal of full enfranchisement

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as can the physical and ideological threats from without. Not unlike
Langston Hughess poem Harlem (1948) from which Hansberry took
her title, Raisin works through multiple avenues of resistance to the
socio-economic trappings of racism, suggesting that the most effective
mode of change is a coalition of unique individuals working together to
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meet a common goal.
Reading Raisins unique brand of pluralism allows one to engage questions of individuality, community, particularity, and universality without
embracing reductive either/or constructions or allowing the plays scholarly use-value to overshadow its content. Much of the best contemporary
scholarship on Hansberrys play engages in debate over Raisins universal
or particular function. Robin Bernstein, Diana Adesola Mafe, and Sandra
Seaton, for example, explore the politics of the plays use in the critical
and cultural imagination to either reinforce or unsettle particular constructs of race, class, and gender. While many of these scholars attempt
to complicate such either/or arguments with pronouncements of
Hansberrys duality (Mafe 36) or fluidity (Bernstein 22), their discussions often spend more time theorizing the plays use than they do examining the play itself. Re-centring the play allows a vision of Raisins
ideological complexity a complexity found not only in its external usevalue but also in its value as a thing itself. The play stresses the necessity
of finding a solid home where one might house and express oneself; at
the same time, Raisin insists that individuals must be willing to join with
other voices and the larger community in order to change oppressive
social systems even if that means singing harmony instead of a solo.
Accordingly, Hansberrys play thematizes the peculiar unity that requires
diverse people to become involved (Terkel 13), recognizing their role in
and responsibility for one nation that has been fractured into many
parts. In so doing, Raisin calls for the rebuilding of a house divided a
building of and from diverse materials and labours.
WHAT HAPPENS TO A DREAM DEFERRED?
When Langston Hughes posed the above question in Harlem, he offered
several possible answers, suggesting that the black response to political,
economic, and social disenfranchisement was neither singular nor easily
defined but rather multiple and potentially volatile. These different
modes of resistance are embodied in the complex and sometimes conflicted Younger family, from Walters belief in the American Dream to
Ruths pragmatism, Mamas spirituality, and Beneathas Pan-Africanism.
Because none of these four characters is central, the play and its audience
weigh and measure all responses equally and participate in the process of
community building.

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Unlike Mama, for whom life is freedom (74), Walter Lee Younger
equates self-expression with material gain and wealth, and his aspirations
mirror the segment of the post-war black population who believed acquiring capital would ensure entrance into good society. As both Ben Keppel
and J. Charles Washington note, Walter embraces the myths creating and
sustaining the American Dream (Keppel 208 09; Washington 114) he
admires those, like George Murchisons wealthy entrepreneurial father,
who thinks big, you know what I mean, I mean for a home (84; emphasis
in original) and makes big bucks seemingly quickly and easily. However, it
is this romantic belief in the ability to make it big that undermines
Walters efforts at self-determination and makes change less possible.
During the scene in which Walter imagines the luxurious life that awaits
him once he has had his chance, the stage directions note that, the
more Walter talks, the farther away he gets from the present space and
moment, his voice ending on a hysterical note (109). Distance and hysteria signal the gap between the actual home and the dream that houses
his hopes. While dreaming is not inherently bad or dangerous, Walters
dream is based on a false promise or, as the play terms it, a hysterical
possibility of success and acceptance hysterical in both senses of
the word; funny because the reader, audience, and Younger family
know that there is no way Walter can attain what he dreams of, given the
social system; and neurotic because Walters belief in this possibility distances him from himself and the real.
Hansberry herself has suggested that Walters failing is his acceptance of
the capitalist economic system that necessarily excludes him from ascendancy: [W]hen we first meet him, he does not wish to alter it; merely to
change his position in it (Authors 198); and the play demonstrates
that race and economics cannot be separated, that capitalism was and
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is founded upon the subjugation of particular raced bodies. Not unlike
his father who sacrificed all including his own flesh (128) for his
dream, Walter Lee accepts a system that refuses to accept him as a
man (143), thereby troubling his sense of self and defusing potential chal5
lenges that he might offer to his familys oppressors. Furthermore, he
seemingly does not recognize that the ruthless, cut-throat, every-manfor-himself mode of capitalism he admires is what cut down and eventually
destroyed the everyday working man that was his father. Until the last
moments of the play, Walter is ready to surrender his will to this system
and exchange his dignity for whatever life (141) it might offer him and
his family.
The evolution of Walters life philosophy illustrates the danger
involved in espousing a system that ensures one just couldnt never
catch up with his dreams (46). Not unlike Big Walter, Walter Lees philosophy begins as a longing to provide for his family and change the way we

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live this beat-up hole everything (32). Yet Walter Lees aspirations
gnaw on his mind and spirit, mutating his dream so that he equates
life with conspicuous consumption (108 09). Willys betrayal alters
Walters life philosophy once more, rendering it a cynical belief in
who gets and who dont get between the takers and the tooken
(141). Walter claims to have figured it out, this system of haves and
have nots, and to have rejected the hysterical view of the American
Dream, with its crying, worrying, and general mixed up psychology. He
suggests that, whereas he was once blind to this system, he now sees that
to get is to accrue both intellectual and material capital, to comprehend
and thereby somehow control the means by which one becomes a have.
However, the audience is left to wonder whether or not this is really the
case, for Walter fails to see the history behind the system of takers and
tooken in America, namely the fact that the original tooken were
those who were taken forcibly from their homes in Africa to work in
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Americas plantations and build up its capitalist infrastructure. Slavery,
sharecropping, and early-twentieth-century industrialism (notably represented in William Attaways 1941 novel Blood on the Forge) took
blacks from their homes and took them in, conning them into believing
that either big effort or big ideas could improve their lot in a nation whose
livelihood depended upon their ongoing economic and social subservience. Thus, Willy Harris is not unique in conning Walter and Bobo out
of their money; rather, he is representative of the system that has conned
many Walter Lee Youngers into believing in the myth of upward mobility
as a fact. When Walters world comes crashing down, he reveals a consciousness that is shaped by oppression, a willingness to submit to The
Man. Like the guys in the streets say The Man. Captain Boss Mistuh
Charley . . . Old Capn Please Mr. Bossman (141; emphasis in original).
Raisins pairing of contemporary and past vernaculars of oppression
implies oppressions persistence both in the capitalist system and in the
collective unconscious of those caught in its machine. Shouting, I didnt
make this world! It was give to me this way! (143), Walter becomes a
taker, but he does not become either The Man or a man because
what he is taking in is an exploitative ideology that reinforces the trap he
is in.
Although she disapproves of Walters plan to open a liquor store with
Willy and Bobo, Ruth similarly houses herself in the American Dreams
portico as she hopes to escape from the familys Southside rat trap
(44). Yet Ruths dream involves the significant differences that emerge
from a version of capitalism that privileges hard work and determination
as the means of social mobility. Unlike Walter Lees think big entrepreneurial vision of the American Dream, Ruths vision is tempered by a pragmatic realism that can be ascribed to her triply bound position as a poor,

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black woman. Hansberrys characterization of Ruth highlights capitalisms

constraints on black womanhood, constraints later articulated by activists
like Frances Beale and Toni Cade Bambara, who state here and now that
the Black woman in America can justly be described as a slave of a
slave (Beale 92). Like Hansberry, these writers identify the cyclical
nature of black womens oppression, namely that racism begets the
system of capitalism (and its afterbirth racism) (Beale 90). Racism,
which limits black mens ability to find meaningful employment, reduces
black women to their biological function (Beale 91) and turns black men
and women against each other, so that they are still abusing each other,
aborting each others nature, (Bambara 103); and these effects ultimately
manifest themselves in the turmoil that we find in the Black family structure (Beale 90). Ruths sarcastic response to Walters personal attack
suggests that she is aware of this cycle and its fruits. Saying, being a
colored woman, I guess I cant help myself none (34), Ruth attempts to
fend off Walters invective and reveal the faulty logic informing his
charge that all black women naturally bring the black man down: he is
using that charge to bring her down. Nevertheless, the weariness with
which Ruth responds to Walter, and the persistence with which she tries
to aid her family and keep their home in order, literally and symbolically
suggest a resigned acceptance of her position of disempowerment within
both the socio-economic system and the structure of her family. Ruth perpetually falls short of the mark that Walter has established for her and
becomes a shadow of her former self.
Walter and Ruth Youngers perpetual disconnection and discord exemplify the strain that socio-economic racism places on the family. The first
breakfast scene, in particular, demonstrates the ways in which these pressures discourage group identity and communion and instead trigger confrontation, alienation, and isolation. During this scene, Walter explains
his liquor store plan to Ruth, who bursts his entrepreneurial bubble with
questions about the schemes viability and ethics while she is preparing
him his morning eggs. She repeatedly tells Walter to eat his eggs a practical statement, for he needs fuel for his days labour but he is too busy
talking his dream. After receiving several admonitions, Walter explodes at
her, DAMN MY EGGS DAMN ALL THE EGGS THAT EVER WAS! (33).
Walter draws a line between himself and his wife where he is here, in
a world of dreams and she is there, full of eggs. In response to
Walter, who later asks her, [W]hy you always trying to give me something
to eat? she replies, What else can I give you, Walter Lee Younger? (88;
emphasis in original). Both literally and metaphorically, Ruth is full of
eggs, producing and reproducing the means of production in a system
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that does not allow her much else. What she can do is feed Walter so he
can work to earn more money with which they can feed their family. At

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the same time, Ruth produces children who are future labourers and the
reason one must work to feed the children. She is caught in a cycle symbolically and literally represented by her reproductive cycle and fertility and
is thereby isolated in her oppression.
Significantly, Hansberry, Bambara, and Beale invoke images of reproduction to discuss black womens bound economic status, arguing that
capitalism both relies upon womens labour to perpetuate its means of production and devalues these same contributions, trapping women in a no
mans land a space neither inside nor outside the system. Perhaps,
here is the real line dividing Ruth from her husband; for unlike Walter,
who only sees the future success of big ideas, Ruth is aware of the
costs demanded by capitalisms system of labour and production an
awareness most pointedly demonstrated by her contemplated abortion.
Ruth believes that another mouth to feed will stymie the Younger
familys chances to get out a point Mama tries to explain to Walter,
saying [w]hen the world gets ugly enough a woman will do anything
for her family. The part thats already living (75; emphasis in original).
Ruth recognizes that it is not only Big Walters body that must be sacrificed
for the familys present well-being but also the potential body growing
inside of her. Walter cannot and does not want to see this aspect of his
dream, so Ruth has to bear this burden of knowledge on her own.
Despite this wisdom, when Walters faith in his ability to become a
taker is shaken, Ruth clings to the idea that hard work can help one
succeed, crying, Ill work twenty hours a day in all the kitchens in
Chicago . . . Ill strap my baby to my back if I have to and scrub all the
floors in America and wash all the sheets in America if I have to but
we got to MOVE! (140). Ruths exclamation reinforces her subservient position within the capitalist system as a domestic in other peoples homes,
signalling that her home and the Youngers new home do not provide
the unqualified out she and the others are seeking.
With Beneatha Younger, Hansberry explores two other homes as possible sites of resistance and change: black nationalism and Pan-Africanism.
A young college student, Beneatha has tried on various means of
expression, from horseback riding to guitar to photography, in an
attempt to discover and assert her self. During the space of the play,
however, her self-exploration assumes a markedly political bent, as her
relationship with the Nigerian Joseph Asagai develops. Asagais discussion
of black power and beauty seemingly awakens in Beneatha a new consciousness of self, history, and nation. In one early exchange, Asagai uses
Beneathas straightened hair as a metaphor for her race consciousness,
accusing her of self mutilation (61) and accommodation to that which
is easier to manage (6162) and ultimately concluding, But what does it
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matter? Assimilationism is so popular in your country (63). Asagais

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charge intimates that what seems easier to Beneatha is, in fact, much more
difficult to attain and maintain. On a literal level, Beneathas beauty
demands physical exertion and a wide array of irons and chemicals, for it
is hard work to subdue roots and tame the seemingly unruly into a straight
head of hair. On another level, Asagais metaphor suggests that the lengths to
which Beneatha goes to express herself and find her identity (62; emphasis in original) are unnatural she need only look inward and backward to
find herself, her people, and her place in the world. Asagais consciousness-raising tutorial, coupled with his gift of Nigerian garb and music,
appears to awaken Beneatha to a new sense of self one that is true to
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her roots and is natural. Proclaiming African superiority in industry,
medicine, and the arts, Beneathas aware self articulates key tenets of the resurging black nationalism in post-war America that embraced historian J.A.
Rodgerss promise that Negro ancestry will come into its own, and Negro
history is the means that will bring it about (72).
Yet George Murchisons reaction to Beneathas discourse on assimilationist, middle-class blacks suggests that her nationalistic fervour is not
wholly new: Oh, dear, dear, dear! Here we go! A lecture on the African
past! On our Great West African Heritage! (81). Georges derision primarily
indicts the class he represents one cut off from its past and nastily (81)
critical of it: [L]ets face it, baby, your heritage is nothing but a bunch of
raggedy-assed spirituals and some grass huts! (81). Indeed, his dismissal
of Beneathas Afrocentric discourse punctuates his distance from both
his heritage and the black community. At the same time, however,
Georges exclamation calls into question the authenticity of Beneathas
awakening, implying that black nationalism may be just another identity
she is trying on for size. The plays audience, too, speculates about
Beneathas commitment to her new-found way of expressing identity, wondering whether she has found her self at last or whether the trappings of
her new consciousness will be discarded later like her riding habit and
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camera.
Celebrating the Ashanti, cutting off her straightened hair for a natural,
taking on a Yoruban pet name, dressing in African garb, and dancing to
Nigerian music, Beneathas eyes are far away back to the past (77);
apparently, she embraces Pan-Africanness as a means of challenging the
racist capitalist system represented by the George Murchisons of the world.
As Margaret B. Wilkerson, Anne Cheney, and others have pointed out,
Lorraine Hansberry was no stranger to African history, culture, and politics:
her uncle was a world renowned scholar of African history at Howard
University, her childhood home in Chicago was a meeting place for
notable figures like W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, and her work on
Paul Robesons radical paper Freedom was an opportunity to write about
contemporary African liberation struggles. Hansberry expressed great

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admiration for African leader Kwame Nkrumah and the movements of the
African people toward colonial liberation (Terkel 14) and wrote, in a letter
to the New York Times Magazine (1961), that the continuation of intrigues
against African and American Negro freedom demands high and steadfast
unity among Negroes (4). Yet the ambiguity with which Hansberry treats
Beneathas tentative plan to marry Asagai and return to Africa with him to
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be a doctor suggests scepticism about the nationalistic plan. Just as
Georges assimilationist black bourgeoisie is an escape rather than a solution to the socio-economic crisis of blackness facing the Younger
family, so, too, is Asagais proposal of a Pan-African return an escape.
Leaving Southside Chicago would not change Southside Chicago nor
would it change her familys present position within that oppressive social
system. Leaving would be unnatural to and for Beneatha a romantic
notion that embraces roots but abandons their fruits.
Elsewhere, Hansberry argues that nationalistic calls for separation [are]
not a program, but an accommodation to American racism (Movement 48).
Hansberrys work implies that separation, whether it be returning to Africa
or establishing a Black Muslim nation within America, replicates the closemindedness sustaining segregation, for it refuses to recognize that blacks
are old stock Americans (Movement 99) and part of an American
nation. Hansberry argues that black separatism fails to see how all
Americans are part of the same national fabric and would tear apart that
fabric only to see all unravel. She acknowledges that sometimes Malcolm
Xs volatile words sound like an easier way to freedom than . . . working,
talking, persuading (Movement 11516), but she also suggests that his is
an immature approach to race relations one that, like Beneathas hair,
seems easier but is quite the opposite. Thus, while the play reinforces
Beneathas strivings towards self-consciousness and the expression of her
individuality, it questions the viability of her plan as the means of achieving
home, proposing in the stage directions that it is both girlish and
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unreasonable (150).
Much to Beneathas disdain, one house in which Mama invests her
hope and her self is Christianity, or the house of the Lord.
Representative of an older generation of blacks who migrated to the
north during the industrial boom of the early twentieth century, Mama
looks to religion to help her to endure and hopefully transcend her
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current situation. Such belief is anathema to Beneathas ideology, and,
in one significant exchange, she rejects the existence of God and denounces
religion as a tool for subduing the masses, only to have Mama slap her and
command, Now you say after me, in my mothers house there is still
God (51). In this moment, we witness a generational and ideological gap
between Lena and Beneatha, for Lena represents a pastness that is not
quite past enough for Beneathas nationalistic fervour. Indeed, Mamas

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southern roots, great migration, and religious faith are old-fashioned but
not originary. Beneatha would bypass it to get at her past and her
history, as she does when she promenades to the radio and, with an
arrogant flourish, turns off the good loud blues that is playing, pronouncing, Enough of this assimilationist junk! (76), and replaces it with
Nigerian tribal music. The arrogant flourish with which Beneatha turns
off the blues illustrates both her privileging of a particular African pastness
and her blindness to the value of this merged aesthetic form (Parks 203),
namely its representation and expression of multiple forms of black experience. With her eye fixed squarely on a singular pastness, Beneatha fails to
see the blues for what it has and does offer to her consciousness, namely
a history of black experience that LeRoi Joness Blues People (1963)
argues embodies the path the slave took to citizenship (ix; emphasis
in original). Thus, Beneatha immaturely rejects the blues because she
cannot hear the polyvocal past and present potential for change they
contain but instead hears assimilation.
Yet Mama, in looking forward, and Beneatha, in looking backward,
both gaze towards imagined communities (either in a hereafter or in a
pre-lapsarian African past), as Hansberry attempts both to reveal similarities between Mamas chosen means of expression and her daughters
and to examine the two potential homes on an equal footing. In an interview, Hansberry noted that religion is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesnt
seem to give an answer, we create one. And it gives us strength (qtd. in
To Be Young 195 97), and it is this creative aspect of Mamas faith that is
similar to the other creative efforts of the Younger family: Mama tries to
identify a means by which the family can transcend racism, poverty, and
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discord.
Although Hansberry takes her plays title from Hughess
Harlem, a more fitting poetic characterization of Mamas struggles is
Hughess Mother to Son, in which the work-worn mother confesses,
[L]ife for me aint been no crystal stair (line 2). Like the poems
speaker, Mama has endured a life of work, disappointment, and dissolved
dream[s] (Hansberry, Raisin 44). Despite physical hardship, emotional disappointments, and systemic oppression, Mama and the mother keep
going But all the time / Ise been a-climbin on (Hughes, Mother to
Son 8 9).
However, Lena Younger is not the stereotyped black matriarch who,
like Faulkners Dilsey, endures despite all and resigns herself in this life
to the promise of the next; instead, she is one who ushers children past
bayonets in Little Rock (Hansberry, This Complex of Womanhood 40),
and who,

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while seeming to cling to traditional restraints, drives the young on into the fire
hoses and one day simply refuses to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery,
or goes out and buys a house in an all-white community where her fourth child
and second daughter will almost be killed by a brick thrown through the window
by a shrieking racist mob. (Hansberry; qtd. in Rich 251)

Hansberrys Mama seemingly cling[s] to traditional restraints as she radically attempts to change the basic fabric of our society (To Be Young 249).
She sees her family falling apart and looks outside conventional options to
solve their problems: [W]e was going backwards stead of forwards.. . .
When it gets like that in life you just got to do something different,
push on out and do something bigger (Raisin 94). Mama believes that religion and its creative power is what makes individuals and families whole
and moves them forwards and bases her radical decision making on the
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belief that something bigger is out there to do and believe in.
Yet, the play suggests that Mamas faith in religions restorative powers,
which manifests itself as faith in the Clybourne Park home, is misplaced
because it fails to confront the violent, present, material realities as it
looks to a new or next life. Unlike Hansberrys desperate and courageous
mother, who patrol[ed] our house all night with a loaded German luger
(To Be Young 51), Mama Younger, in her conflation of her literal house and
her personal home or sanctuary in religion, ignores the immediate
dangers she and her family will face dangers in this world, announced
in the newspaper headlines and intimated by Mr. Lindner. After Mr.
Lindner logically claims that a man, right or wrong, has the right to
want to have the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way (117),
that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities (118; emphasis in original), and that the Youngers have nothing to
gain by moving into a neighbourhood where you just arent wanted and
where some elements well people can get awful worked up when
they feel that their whole way of life and everything theyve ever worked
for is threatened (119), he says almost sadly, You just cant force
people to change their hearts (119). This exchange reveals the cracks in
Mamas foundation: she invests her faith and money in the power of a
change of heart a Christian conversion where one is born again to
love and charity both within her family and within the Clybourne Park
neighbourhood. However, Mr. Lindners comments show that her faith
has no place in the Southside Chicago world where work and the fruits
of ones work can get one worked up against outside communities
who seemingly threaten ones position. Mama and her family have the
potential to be reborn in their new house, but what Mr. Lindner recognizes and she will not is that it is bound to be a difficult and potentially
bloody labour.

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Thus, no one home is privileged in Raisin; rather, the play shows that
the Younger familys possible means of hope and resistance are located in a
new home comprised of various parts of their old homes. The Younger
family is weakest when it is a house divided against itself when they
use various modes of resistance as weapons against each other because
the weight of outside oppression has come down between (52, 88)
them. When Beneatha denies Walter his personhood and calls him a
rat (144), when Walter dismisses Ruths expression of her views and
calls her small-minded (35), and when Beneatha mocks Mama and her
right to believe as she chooses (50 51), the family loses its potency and
its life. Mama recognizes this self-destructiveness, saying [D]eath done
come in this here house.. . . Done come walking in my house on the lips
of my children. You what supposed to be my beginning again. You
what supposed to be my harvest (144). True to capitalisms consumption
of others labour and ideas, members of the Younger family battle each
other over scarce resources, consuming or destroying all that stands in
their way. In so doing, they invite death into their house an ending
instead of Mamas beginning again.
Conversely, when the family recognize the value in each others means of
expression and measure each other right (145), then they are able to unite
17
versus outside oppressors. The Younger family spend the majority of the
play seeing difference as that which they must fight against, failing to see
differences utility and potential to liberate them. The awareness the
Youngers need is not unlike what Hansberry suggests the Negro writer
must find: We must turn our eyes outward but, to do so, we must also
turn them inward toward our people and their complex and still transitory
culture (The Negro Writer 7; emphasis in original). While entrepreneurialism, hard work, black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and religion alone fail to
release the Younger family from their present condition, Walters
pride, Ruths pragmatism, Beneathas consciousness, and Lenas
faith succeed in fusing the family together to face both the immediate challenge Mr. Lindners efforts to prevent their move and those challenges
inevitably to come in an all-white neighbourhood.
Although Walters pronouncement at the plays close can be read as a
patriarchal assumption of power, examining his language in light of the
Younger familys various attempts to find and express their identity
reveals the communal dimension of this rhetorical defiance: [W]e are
very proud.. . . And we have all thought about your offer . . . and we have
decided to move into our house.. . . [W]e will try to be good neighbors.
18
And thats all we got to say (148; emphasis added). It is not a royal
we Walter offers Mr. Lindner but an amalgamation of the opinions
voiced from the homes occupied by Beneatha, Ruth, and Mama race
pride, pragmatism, and a hopeful faith in the good of humanity. There is

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KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS

a multiplicity of voices in Walters words, and the audience hears echoes of

earlier conversations in his assertion and sees Mamas hope that everybody kind of pitch in (44) come to pass. Thus, the play suggests that it
is not necessarily economic resources that keep a home but rather the
net worth of the self-expression of a number of different individuals.
Walters words typify David Coopers claim that social justice is the collective expression of idealism deeply felt by individuals (60), for both the
source and matter emerge from the idealistic community of individuals
living in his home, and the result is a small victory of social justice.
The family discovers a group identity, one comprised of idealistic individuals working toward a particular end in this scene, asserting their rights
19
to live where and how they choose. The result of this polyvocality is a
transformation not just for Walter but for the family as a whole, which,
20
like Ruth, com[es] to life (149). Yet, while this life signals potential
healing for the Youngers, it also underscores the ominous foreboding at
Raisins close, for an enlivened group identity will be necessary to face
what the play almost guarantees will be a violent welcome to the
familys new home.
Another way to read the additive function of this moment is through
Hughess poem. After posing the question, What happens to a dream
deferred (1), Hughes examines various responses or effects: Does it dry
up / Like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore / And then run? /
Does it stink like rotten meat / Or crust and sugar over / Like a syrupy
sweet? (lines 2 8). One could argue that Ruth is dried up at various
times throughout the play she is characterized as weary, tired, disappointed, settled, and older than her years (52). Her hope is gone, and
she lives to live another day. Walters dream fester[s] like a sore one perpetually irritated by a world seemingly just beyond his fingertips the
world he sees from his vantage point as chauffeur. After Willy steals the
money, Walter himself runs leaving his family, home, and job to
wander about Chicago and the Midwestern farmland because dont
nothing matter worth a damn (105 06). The corpses of Beneathas
various moves to express her self are littered about the Younger
familys collective consciousness, and they stink. Beneatha herself often
causes a stink if her means of expressing herself is not applauded by all.
Mamas Christian response to a lifetime of oppression could be read as
a syrupy sweet, as the sugaring over of present realities with the crust
of faith and prayer. Hansberrys characters carry the existential load
voiced in Hughess poem; yet, while these responses on their own are
self-destructive and paralysing, their aggregate function is revolutionary:
Or does it explode? (11; emphasis added). When combined or functioning
as a community like the Younger family, those whose dreams have been
deferred can explode the mechanisms of their oppression. Nevertheless,

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The Politics of Home in Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun

bound up in this possibility is a more ominous, violent potential and thus a

warning: if alienation and oppression continue to constitute the norm for
local and national race relations, then America could find itself in a more
21
volatile political situation.
HOME OF THE BRAVE
The Younger familys refusal of Mr. Lindners offer points towards the
final function of home in Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun; namely, the
plays exposure of the inconsistencies in national narratives that proclaim
all men are created equal and possess unalienable rights while simultaneously withholding the rights and protections of this home from
Americas tired, hungry, and poor minority population. Like her speech
at a 1964 gathering of the United Negro College Fund, Hansberrys play
announces the things that we have learned in this unkind house that we
have to tell the world about! (To Be Young 263) and charges those of the
next generation to continue bearing witness to the injustices in Americas
national narrative. Raisin explicitly documents the double bind in which
modern African Americans find themselves when pursuing the promised
fruits of American citizenship. From their earliest days of residence in
America, African Americans have built and sustained others American
Dream, but like Big Walter, have been denied their own dreams. As the
tooken, African Americans were denied subjectivity and humanity and
therefore were excluded from the promises of home: safety, shelter, ownership, and citizenship.
Hansberrys posthumously published article Scars of the Ghetto (1965)
also emphasizes this discrepancy, invoking touchstone texts of American
liberty like the Constitution, Lincolns famed House Divided oration, and
the Judeo-Christian bible to expose the dissonance between Americas
ideals of inclusive opportunity and its real reluctance to grant this to all of
its people. Alluding to the Old Testament stories of the disinherited Esau
and Ishmael, Hansberry argues that the current struggle of the Negro
people in the United States [is] to wrest their birthright of full citizenship
from a laggard and oppressive nation (Scars 588). Both here and in
Raisin, Hansberry proposes that the oppressive nation, or house, that has
withheld from African Americans their birthright of full citizenship is to
be forcibly stormed. That is not to say that Hansberry encourages violence
but rather that she recognizes that the present national order gives black
people nothing even that which is their right by birth if all men are
created equal and they must demand, wrest, and reclaim what they
are due for the good of themselves and their nation. As the community representative, Mr. Lindners seeming willingness to give the Youngers a fair
price for their home is, in fact, another attempt to steal, degrade, and deny

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KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS

them their rights as citizens and humans. Thus, the Youngers must refuse to
take and must instead move into the white neighbourhood to reaffirm their
humanity and reveal the constructedness of the colour line.
Hansberry further argues that if African Americans are to reclaim their
birthright of full citizenship, then America needs a leadership which has
no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate
to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and
inescapable cause of it which of course is the present organization of
American society (Scars 591). Such condemnation would acknowledge
the failure of the national narrative to recognize African Americans a
failure rooted in founding documents and religious ideologies that not
only denied non-whites property ownership but also denied non-whites
their humanity and made them property to be owned. It is this failure,
Wilkerson notes, that Hansberrys play attempts to reveal and rectify:
Hansberry [uses] their aspirations as metaphors for the dream of freedom
and the right to be regarded as not only a citizen but as a human being
(Political Radicalism 40).
Hansberry puts a finer point on Americas failure: [T]he nation presumes upon the citizenship of the Negro but is oblivious to the fact that
it must confer citizenship before it can expect reciprocity. Until twenty
million people are completely interwoven into the fabric of our
society they are under no obligation to behave as if they were (To Be
Young 221; emphasis in original). Like an earlier young, radical, New York
writer Randolph Bourne Hansberry takes issue with current ideals
and assumptions about America and Americanness. She argues that
full citizenship demands that the nation recognize the Negro and
what she or he has contributed to the national fabric and that, until that
is done, those in power cannot expect the Negro to continue performing
her or his part in the maintenance and upkeep of this unkind house. Over
forty years earlier, Bournes Transnational America (1916) too pointed
out the hypocrisy of Americas concept of citizenry: racial and ethnic minorities were asked to give up their cultural differences, traditions, and selves
in order to be American, while the dominant Anglo-Saxon group gave
nothing but rather clung that much tighter to aspects of identity and
culture that even mother England had abandoned long ago (174, 172). In
place of this stagnant national ideal, Bourne proposed that America be
seen as a tapestry, whose strength and vitality derived from and was dependent upon its various interwoven threads (179). Like Bourne, Hansberrys
body of work calls for an interweaving, both within the black community
and within the larger community that is America. Contrary to Harold
Cruses charge in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Hansberry makes
no assimilationist call to be absorbed into white middle-class society. As
she states in a 1964 letter to The Village Voice, integration is not a call

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The Politics of Home in Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun

for African Americans to be absorbed into this house, but rather a notice
that the Negro people would like to see this house rebuilt (Miss
Hansberry 16).
A Raisin in a Sun demonstrates that the house as it now stands is not
only divided, but run-down and in need of reconstruction. Thus,
Hansberrys play calls for committed builders those who will tear down
the broken house and put up a new one in its place; for, as Hansberry
stated in her Drama Critics Circle Award acceptance speech, Vulgarity,
blind conformity, and mass lethargy need not triumph in the land of
Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.. . . I
believe that we can impose beauty on our future (qtd. in To Be Young
130; emphasis in original). Hansberrys play contends that one can
command ones destiny as an individual, as part of a group, and as part
of a nation. Yet that contention is rooted not in a utopianism blind to
the ugliness both within the system and within the African-American
community, but in a realism about what is the still bitter epic of the
black man in this most hostile nation, where he is also mired in many
of the corruptions of our culture (Hansberry, Negro Writer 10, 11) as
well as in a vision of the nation as you think it ought to be and must
be (To Be Young 263; emphasis in original). Raisins close recognizes
that transgressing the colour line is not going to be without difficulty, violence, or casualty. Mr. Lindners final words I sure hope you people
know what youre getting into (149) forecast trouble for the family and
others similarly resisting oppressive institutions. Critic Lloyd Brown
rightly notes, [T]he tactical defeat of individual racists is not, ipso facto,
the destruction of racism (244). Furthermore, the play recognizes that
changing mentalities within the Younger family that result from oppression
will not happen overnight. As mentioned previously, Walter and Beneatha
seemingly revert back to their previous selves after Mr. Lindners departure.
Yet, like a rainbow after the rain (151), the possible good or light that
can come from this decisive family moment in which many colourful personalities unite is evident: Mamas love is heightened, Walter gains his
manhood, Ruths pride runneth over, Beneathas hope is restored, and
there is potential for new life as a unified whole.
A fundamentally radical perspective, Hansberrys pluralistic vision of
America created by and for the people measures and attempts to make
right Americas claims of and avenues for liberty and justice for all.
Like Toni Bambara, who claims, If your house aint in order, you aint in
order (110), A Raisin in the Sun looks at the house that is America, identifies its problems, and calls for the young and old, artist and worker, black
and white to rebirth Americas founding principles. Raisins charge is
echoed in the final page of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committees (SNCC) photo-essay, The Movement (1964), which pairs a

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KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS

photo of a black youth staring into the camera with Hansberrys words:
They stand in the hose fire at Birmingham; they stand in the rain at
Hattiesburg. They are young, they are beautiful, they are determined. It is
for us to create, now, an America that deserves them (122).

NOTES
1

572

Sincerest thanks to Rachel Ligairi for her thoughtful reading of this essay. My
thanks also go to the anonymous readers at Modern Drama for their insightful
comments on and suggestions for the manuscript.
Equally known is Hansberrys alleged remark to the New York Times that I told
them this wasnt a Negro play. It was a play about honest-to-God, believable,
many-sided people who happened to be Negroes (qtd. in Robertson). Yet, as
Robin Bernstein has convincingly demonstrated, the Times misquoted
Hansberry, about which she commented in her scrapbook, next to the article
clipping, Never said NO such thing. Miss Robertson [the interviewer] goofed
letter sent posthaste Tune in next week (qtd. in Bernstein 23). As all
Hansberry scholars know, neither Hansberrys letter nor any correction ever
appeared in the Times.
Hansberrys social ethic can be situated within the tradition of radical theatre
most prominent during the inter-war period of American Drama. Indeed, Raisin
could be read alongside plays like Clifford Odetss Waiting for Lefty and Awake
and Sing!; Elmer Rices We, the People; and the drama produced by the Group
Theater, Federal Theater Project, or the Living Newspaper group drama which
strove to stage the voice of the people as a collective entity and vehicle for
change. At the same time, however, Hansberrys work diverges from this
tradition in the pluralist nature of her proposed project. Whereas the social ethic
of earlier leftist drama was modelled on a markedly (and sometimes singularly)
Marxist aesthetic that privileged the collective voice over the individual voices of
which the whole was comprised, Hansberrys drama anticipates the pluralist
ethic and aesthetic that emerged in the late 1970s, bloomed under the identity
politics of the 1980s, and persisted with the theorization of individual and
cultural hybridity in the 1990s. This pluralist social ethic constructs and
depends upon a polyphonous exchange of sorts. Not unlike Ntozake Shanges
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf or Anna
Deavere Smiths Fires in the Mirror, Raisin resists privileging the collective over
the individual and instead insists on foregrounding the relationship between
whole and part. Raisin demands that expressions of individuality not be
subsumed but rather recognized for their contributions to and negotiations with
a larger, malleable whole. Thus Hansberry can be read as an important bridge
between early and late representations of the people in twentieth-century
American drama.
Although Hansberrys biographer, Margaret Wilkerson, claims the play critiques
materialism (Sighted 95), a close reading of the play reveals a condemnation
of capitalism as a system not just of its fruits. Even more striking, however, is
James McKellys complete misreading of Raisins economics, for he argues that

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Hansberrys play is a pro-capitalist venture that affirms the American Dream,
arguing that Hansberry never strays from her implicit premise that American
democratic capitalism can be the vehicle of African-American political and
economic ascent (87). He argues that something changed . . . [i]n 1962 (88) and
that Hansberry suddenly grew critical of capitalism as a viable means of ascent.
However, a quick perusal of her early radical writings in conjunction with her
characterization of capitalisms corrupting and cannibalistic affect on the
Younger family reveals a marked distrust of and disdain for the economic system.
5 Ironically, Walter associates money with manhood, as is illustrated in an earlier
scene with his son, Travis. Ruth has told Travis she cannot spare the fifty cents
he is supposed to bring to school (28). However, when Walter learns this, he
sides with Travis against Ruth and uses this as an opportunity to assert a small
amount of economic authority. Asking Ruth, What you tell the boys things like
that for? Walter then makes a grand display of furnishing his son with the
money and pronouncing his paternity, Here, son (31). The stage directions at
this moment demonstrate Walters confusion of money with manhood (a.k.a.
power), reading Reaching down into his pants with a rather important
gesture . . . He hands the boy the coin, but his eyes are directed to his wifes (31).
Because he has felt emasculated by this system of takers and tooken, Walter
believes controlling the familys money will somehow re-establish his manhood.
6 Hansberry explores this relationship even more explicitly in her unproduced TV
drama on slavery, The Drinking Gourd. In this screenplay, Hansberry clearly
identifies slavery as the foundation of Americas economic system and
oppression.
7 Angeletta K.M. Gourdine rightly identifies that Americas violent economic
history of keeping the black man down also had serious physical, psychological, and ideological consequences for black women. Indeed, not only does
Ruth feel the material consequences of capitalisms efforts to keep Walter
down and in his place, but Walters invective also turns towards her as a
reminder of his failure (34 35). In fact, Walter inverts the oppressor/oppressed
binary, so that Ruth is his oppressor and capitalism is his salvation from women
with small minds (35). In consequence, Ruth is drained of life, as evidenced
by her weariness and premature aging.
8 Ruth is not the only woman linked to eggs, for Mamas maiden name is
Eggleston (139), reinforcing the implication that the value of black women is
their ability to produce and reproduce.
9 Earlier in her career, Hansberry critiqued what she termed the program of
historical and cultural obliteration that distorts and disparages [young blacks]
identity (Life Challenges Negro Youth 7). She argued that in a land where
the Grace Kelly Marilyn Monroe mono-typed ideal is imposed, on the
national culture, racist logic insists that anything directly opposite no matter
how lovely is naturally ugly (7). Here Hansberry anticipates black feminisms interrogation of the politics of black hair and beauty; cf. Zook; Walker.
10 The exchange between Asagai and Beneatha also foreshadows the return of the
natural as part of the Black Power movements black is beautiful calls for race
consciousness.

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KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS
11 This is not to say that Hansberry is ultimately critical of Beneatha; rather, her
lovingly playful characterization emphasizes that the manner in which
Beneathas quests for self-expression reflect a youthful exuberance that at times
impedes her overall endeavours. In the Terkel interview, Hansberry readily admits
that Beneatha is myself, eight years ago, you know. I enjoyed making fun of her
because I have that kind of confidence about what she represents.. . . Shes precocious, shes over-outspoken, shes everything, you know, which tends to be
comic . . . but I also feel that she doesnt have a word in the play that I dont agree
with, still today. I would say it differently today (13). Beneathas means of
expressing her individuality troubles the matter she is expressing, and that
distinction is significant in light of the plays effort to find an effective vehicle of
expression to combat systemic racism. Beneathas intelligence and perceptiveness are not at issue her means of expressing these are. Thus, her flightiness
reveals a social immaturity, not necessarily an intellectual one.
12 Beneathas potential move anticipates the resurging back to Africa movement
of the 1960s as expressed in works like Stokely Carmichaels Pan-Africanism
Land and Power (1969) and Amiri Barakas Speech to the Congress of African
Peoples (1970).
13 One could further argue that Beneathas interest in black nationalism and PanAfricanism are troubled because these movements would deny her the power
and means of expression for which she seeks. As Gloria Wade-Gayles and others
have argued, [T]he roll of black leaders was predominantly male (26) a
problem Alice Walker explores at length in Meridian (1976) and Beneatha
would most likely have been denied her desire to express her self and cure what
ails mankind (Raisin 133). We see intimations of this when Asagai speaks of
the African Prince [who] rose up out of the seas and swept the maiden back
across the middle passage over which her ancestors had come, for he objectifies and romanticizes Beneatha as the object that must be rescued and
restored (137). The stage directions note that Beneatha is [u]nable to play
(137), and indeed she would have been in the emerging nationalistic movements for black civil rights.
14 Sheri Parks makes the excellent observation that Mamas religiosity can be read
as both Christian and Afrocentric that her various performances of spirituality
reflect a negotiation of these two traditions (204 05). Parks cites the line, In my
mothers house there is God as both an imposition of Mamas Christian will on
her stridently atheistic daughter and as evidence of her Afrocentric belief that
gods and ancestors are perpetually present (207). Indeed, the stage directions
suggest this, likening Mamas demeanour to the noble bearing of the women of
the Hereros of Southwest Africa (39). If we read Mama as embodying both of
these traditions, then she is less assimilationist than Beneatha, for her
Africanisms are a lived practice and not a nostalgic performance. Yet the
ignorance about Africa and contemporary Africans Mama displays suggests that
any connection to her Africanness is an unconscious one or that the African
roots of her practices have been largely forgotten.
15 Many critics miss Hansberrys admiration for Mama, not necessarily for her
beliefs themselves, but for what she does with them. Joy Abell, for instance,

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The Politics of Home in Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun

reads Hansberrys claim that I rather admire this human quality to make our
own crutches as long as we need them. The only thing I am saying is that once
we can walk, you know then drop them (To Be Young 197; emphasis in
original) as dismissing religion as a crutch (Abell 463); yet, what she and others
overlook is the way in which Hansberry sees that religion can move one to
radical answers. What they fail to recognize is that religion has a value and
function that can help one move.
16 In her foundational Hansberry study, The Sighted Eyes and Feeling Heart of
Lorraine Hansberry, Wilkerson, too, suggests that Mama is a radical, claiming,
While Mama may seem to be merely conservative, clinging to an older generation, it is she who, in fact, is the mother of revolutionaries; it is she who
makes possible the change and movement of the new generation (97). While
Wilkerson rightly argues that Mama makes possible resistance and change in
and for the new generation, this reading does not seem to recognize Mama as
revolutionary in her own right. Mamas actions cut to the root of oppression and
affect change now not just facilitate the possibility of change later.
17 Steven Carters excellent examination of Hansberrys work argues that Raisin
reveals both the diversity of the family members, seen as representatives of the
African-American community, as well as their unity and bravery in standing up
to the insults, threats, and near-certain violence (24). Whereas Carter locates
the Youngers diversity in their representing various African-American types, I
contend that their diversity is found in their differing responses to oppression
and in their differing proposed means of escape. Furthermore, the unity the
Youngers voice is marked by the interplay of these different modes of resistance.
18 Wilkerson reads Walters pronouncement as his rebirth through Mama:
Walter speaks the words and takes the action, but Mama provides the
context. She, who embodies the races will to transcend and who forms that
critical link between the past and the future, articulates and transmits the
traditions of the race to the next generation. Her wisdom and compassion
provide the context for him to attain true manhood, to advance materially
without becoming materialistic. (Sighted 96)
Although Wilkerson avoids pitting Walters claims to centrality against those of
Mama, she seems to read Walters pronouncement as the act calling into being
his manhood an act cultivated by others but wholly his own. In so doing,
Wilkerson denies Ruth and Beneatha any authority or voice not even the
context that Mama provides. Brown recognizes multiple voices in Hansberrys
play and in Walters words, but he reads this multiplicity as irony that finds
space for both only as one undercuts another (240), ignoring the conversations
among the voices in the play and presenting another either/or, instead of the
both/and Hansberry maps out.
19 Parks argues, [G]roup identity with the culture and the family are historically
significant tools of survival for black people and asserts that such reconciliation is central to Raisin (203).

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KRISTIN L. MATTHEWS
20 However, it would be a mistake to think Walter is irrevocably changed at this
point. As Seaton argues, Hansberry does not suggest that Walters decision to
refuse the committees money implies that he is a totally changed person who
no longer values money; for, at the plays close, Walter advises Beneatha to
marry a rich man and the siblings bicker as they have before, with Mamas
commenting to Ruth on this continual bickering (45).
21 Reverberating in this warning is the context from which Raisin emerged and
towards which it was looking. On the one hand, Hansberry was writing this play
as Africa was in the process of throwing off its colonial shackles a process
marked by violent upheaval. A supporter of the liberation efforts in Africa,
Hansberry was also troubled by its explosively violent excesses, and this tension
is evident in her posthumously published and performed play, Les Blancs
(1969). On the other hand, Hansberrys play identifies the seeds of what will
later become the Black Power movement and implicitly warns that continued
white separatism may generate a violent separatist backlash.

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ABSTRACT: This essay examines the complexities of home in Lorraine Hansberrys

prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). While scholars have discussed how the
home purchased by Lena Younger at Raisins close signifies a radical challenge to and
revision of the American Dream, few have explored the ways in which this literal home
mirrors the psycho-social struggle of mid-century African Americans to attain, secure,
and define a sense of place, or home, in the face of systemic socio-economic racism.
I argue that the Younger familys Clybourne Park home is more than a structural device
used to catalyze the denouement. Rather, this physical space illuminates the diverse
psychological and ideological homes the Younger family seeks throughout the play,
as Raisin probes the racially charged politics of home ownership particular to post
World War II Southside Chicago, investigates the viability and vulnerability of the
various homes occupied by the Younger family in their attempts to find and
express themselves, and confronts national myths of home that associate citizenship
with property ownership. Understood in light of the gaps and inconsistencies in national
narratives that proclaim all men are created equal but deny to some the rights and protections that belong to being at home, home becomes a complex space that is simultaneously material, historical, philosophical, psychological, and political. Lorraine
Hansberrys play recognizes the interconnectedness of personal and social struggles to
feel at home in ones nation, ones community, and ones own skin, and does not
offer a blueprint for dismantling the masters house. Instead, A Raisin in the Sun is a
pluralist call for committed builders those willing to use their diverse tools in
concert to reconstruct vital homes and come closer to realizing the dream deferred:
America as home of the brave and land of the free.
KEYWORDS: Hansberry, Raisin in the Sun, American Dream, home, discrimination, capitalism, black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Christianity, pluralism, community

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