Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

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 audiences here are Negroes. Even so, it isn't written for Negroes .... It's a show about people, white or colored .... I see ‘A 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'" (or "a family that happens to be colored"); Sidney Poitier played "the angry young man who happens to be a Negro.”