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When Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, the vast majority of white critics praised the play's "universality." One reviewer wrote, "A Negro wrote this show. It is played, with one exception, by Negroes. Half the authences here are Negroes. Even so, it isn't written for Negroes .... It's a show about people, white or colored .... I see ? Raisin in the Sun' as part of the general culture of the U.S.'" The phrase "happens to be" appeared with remarkable frequency among reviews: the play was "about human beings, who happen to be Negroes"2 (or "a family that happens to be colored"3); Sidney Poitier played "the angry young man who happens to be a Negro."4
Other white reviewers, however, praised the play not for its universality, but for its particularity. "The play is honest," wrote Brooks Atkinson, critic for the New York Times. "[Hansberry] has told the inner as well as the outer truth about a Negro family in the southside of Chicago at the present time."5 "This Negro play," wrote another reviewer, "celebrates with slow impressiveness a triumph of racial pride."6
How can a play be simultaneously specific and universal? This apparent paradox is easily resolved with the assertion that African-Americans are precisely as human - and African-American cultures just as universal or particular - as members of any other group. Hansberry herself pointed out the nonexistence of the paradox:
Interviewer: The question, I'm sure, is asked you many times - you must be tired of it - someone comes up to you and says: "This is not really a Negro play; why, this could be about anybody! It's a play about people!" What is your reaction? What do you say?
Hansberry: Well[,] I hadn't noticed the contradiction because I'd always been under the impression that Negroes are people .... One of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific7
Hansberry's solution to Ae apparent paradox did not go unnoticed or unremarked. Novelist John Oliver Killens and historian and editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., for example, both noted Hansberry's ability to be "universal in her particularity."8
The paradox, then, is that a paradox...