51 pages • 1 hour read
Crystal Smith PaulDid You Hear About Kitty Karr?
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The History of Race and Racism in the US
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of racism, rape, and racially motivated hate crimes.
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? bases its events and characters on the historical experiences of Black Americans during the 20th and 21st centuries. Kitty was born Mary Ledbetter in the South during the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation between Black and white Americans in the South from 1877 to approximately 1954, when the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional. Kitty’s origins incorporate other historical aspects of the early-20th-century experiences of Black women. Her mother, Hazel, was raped by her white employer, a legacy of sexual exploitation of Black women that stretches back to before the Civil War. Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? also refers to many historical events of the civil rights movement, including the murder of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the work and death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Elise’s 2017 narrative also incorporates modern-day events and issues related to US racism, driving home the fact that racism is not a thing of the past. Elise alludes to historic moments like Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem and the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. By referring to these real-world events, the book articulates its arguments regarding the realities of structural racism in the US and demonstrates how issues that plagued Black Americans in the past remain a problem in the present. Both Kitty and Elise must navigate racial discrimination and tensions. Kitty had to completely disavow her Blackness to gain favor in Hollywood; Elise is “allowed” to be Black but is pressured to efface her Blackness. For example, when Elise posts about Colin Kaepernick and police brutality on her Instagram, her publicist takes the posts down. Elise herself says she witnessed police brutality when her own father was pulled over, cursed at (including with racial slurs), and tackled by the police. This occurred in the mid-1990s, alluding to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991.
The way the narrative is structured, switching between the past and present-day perspectives, encourages the reader to recognize the deeply ingrained and prevalent nature of structural racism in the US. The book caps its discussion with reparations to Black Americans, a topic that has become more prominent in the US in recent years. The term itself dates to World War I when Germany was held responsible for damages to civilians and asked to pay reparations. In the wake of World War II, reparations were again required, not only from Germany but also from Italy, Finland, and Japan. In more recent history, there have been discussions of the US federal government paying reparations to descendants of enslaved people.
Historical Context: “Passing” in 20th-Century America
When Kitty goes to Hollywood, she finds success by “passing” as white. From emancipation through the middle of the 20th century, passing to escape racial discrimination and access segregated spaces and opportunities was a relatively common practice among Black Americans. Some would pass only in particular situations. Actress and singer Fredi Washington, for instance, passed as white to get ice cream for her fellow Black performers when she toured with Duke Ellington’s band in the Jim Crow South, but she embraced her Black identity as an actress in Hollywood (Blakemore, Erin. “The Fair-Skinned Black Actress Who Refused to ‘Pass’ in 1930s Hollywood.” History, 14 Jan. 2023). Others, like Kitty in the novel, left their families behind and lived as their new, white identity for the rest of their lives. Passing was and is a fraught topic among Black Americans. While some considered passing a clever way to use white people’s discrimination against them, others saw disavowing one’s race as a betrayal. In her book A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), historian Allyson Hobbs documents the great costs that came with passing along with the social advantages, including the loss of family, community, and identity.
Passing has been a popular subject of novels and films since the early 20th century. Fredi Washington starred in one of the most famous films about passing, 1934’s The Imitation of Life. The 1929 novel Passing by Nella Larson, which tells the story of a Black woman who disguises her past to join white society, has been adapted to the screen several times, including a 2021 Netflix series. Other prominent fictional works about passing include Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1920), and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000).
