Indeed, readers of world literature would have to wait until the twentieth century for inexplicable strangeness and the peculiar to become key terms of storytelling. Surrealism would soon introduce to the world "automatic writing," whose departure point was the liberation of unconscious desires through unmediated dream- narration. Yet Melville's cunning inversion on the eve of the Civil War-making the "white race" into the "Peculiar Institution" instead of black slavery-proved that this form of writing is always available to the Euroamerican writer whose particular psychosis, white identity, is the society's founding principle. Captain Delano's dream-narration, captured unwittingly and automatically by his Euroamerican analyst-Melville's "white" narrator-is not only surrealist in the rawest sense but a powerful indictment of white supremacism's most shameless pleasure: the total displacement of historical reality in the pursuit of unmediated psychic ecstasy.

A brief detour through Toni Morrison's brilliant monograph, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), will help substantiate some of these assertions about Melville's story. Her thesis is that, while the liberal critique of white racism has served an admirable purpose, it has at the same time created a self-serving illusion about how the system of white racial oppression actually works. The white identity does not come only at the expense of not-whites but of whites themselves, or, more precisely, of Euro- americans who have been adapted into an already "white" American social order. As Morrison frames it: "equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters" (12). Her main point is straightforward-in fact it "requires hard work not to see this," she says. Just as racial slavery enabled the Anglo-American capitalist class to amass vast material fortunes, so did white supremacist ideology enable white writers to explore, without any of the normal, civilizing restraints, the "darkest" aspects of the human psyche. "The fabrication of an Africanist persona," Morrison writes, "is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity" (17). In another passage she crystallizes this argument, which she will go on to substantiate through several close readings of canonical U.S. texts, in a few tightly-constructed sentences: "Black slavery enriched the country's creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination" (38).

Melville, whose readership of course was white, stages the drama of "Benito Cereno" in such a way that the white imagination is perspicaciously objectified. Not until the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s would this kind of systematic objectification of whiteness enter the mainstream. In the '60s it came through the experimental stand-up comedy of artists such as Richard Pryor and Dick Gregory, the cinema of Gordon Parks, the political genius of Malcolm X, the savvy manipulations of the white media by Muhammad Ali, and the popular poetry of Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez. Enabled by the steady march forward of the civil rights struggle, crystallized in Dr. King's unchallengeable moral critique of white racial oppression, the objectification of white identity in the '60s prepared the way precisely for the theory of race advanced by Morrison in Playing in the Dark. Thus it is instructive to glean from Melville's objectifications a kind of blueprint for this new critique, which would have to wait one hundred years for a full elaboration.

Captain Delano's white reflex is to deny totally and out of hand the possibility of black equality. In the case of the ongoing African mutiny on board the San Dominick, Delano's denial consists in saying that "they were too stupid" to realize such a revolt (175). Delano has encountered the San Dominick off the coast of southern Chile by accident: by following the protocols of the modern sea captain, he approaches the San Dominick as a friend, to see what sort of assistance the vessel in distress requires. The slave ship's name is Melville's first act of signifyin', and from this point forward his rhetorical javelins are thrown relentlessly at white readers. For in 1799 the Haitian Revolution was in full swing, a fact Captain Delano has completely blocked from consciousness. As any sea captain of the age would have known only too well, by 1799 the African slaves of the French West Indian colony of San Domingo were winning an epic war of liberation against the soldiers of the French monarchy. And at the same time they were valiantly fighting off a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 60,000 men, and a French expedition of similar size under Bonaparte's brother-in-law. As C.L.R. James famously recorded it in The Black Jacobins: "The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history, and the odds it had to overcome is evidence of the magnitude of the interests that were involved. The transformation of slaves, trembling in hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement" (iv). But of all this world-historical drama, the worldly Captain Delano is somehow completely ignorant. How could this be?

To answer this question requires another detour, this time through the historical research of Theodore Allen in his two-volume study of white racial oppression, The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997). Allen's thesis is that the hallmark of racial oppression is that it "reduces all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, a status beneath that of any member of any social class within the colonizing population" (vol. 1, 32). Allen shows that, in the U.S. context where white racial oppression was opted for by the Anglo-American ruling class as a means of socially controlling the excessive influx of poor and propertyless European immigrant laborers, its defining characteristics were: (1) declassing legislation, directed at African American property-holders; (2) depriving African Americans of their civil rights; (3) outlawing African American literacy; and (4) displacement of African American family rights and authorities (vol. 1, 82). The result was the social formation of a new "middle class"-the "white race"-in which membership rights and privileges were made conditional on keeping not-"whites" down and out. In what Allen terms "the Great Social Safety Valve of American History," he explains the logic of this "white race" monolith:

The white laboring people's prospect of lateral mobility to "free land," however unrealizable it was in actuality, did serve in diverting them from struggles with the bourgeoisie. But that was merely one aspect of the Great Safety Valve, the system of racial privileges conferred on laboring-class European-Americans, rural and urban, poor and exploited though they themselves were. That has been the main historical guarantee of the rule of the "Titans," damping down anti-capitalist pressures by making "race, and not class, the distinction in social life" [the phrase is from Lyon G. Tyler, the seventeenth president of William and Mary College, in a paper read before the Virginia Historical Society in 1894]. This, more than any other factor, has shaped the "contours of American history"-from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the Civil War, to the overthrow of Reconstruction, to the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, to the Great Depression, to the civil rights struggle and the "white backlash" of our own day (vol. 2, 258).

The key terms of Allen's analysis that help answer the question of Captain Delano's white blindness are "'white race' solidarity" and "class-collaborationism." First, Delano immediately identifies with the Spanish sailors on board the San Dominick even though they are in direct competition with his own commercial operations, speak a different language, represent a different empire, and practice a different religion. His identity politics go no deeper than the Spaniards' pale faces. And second, Delano himself does not traffic in slaves-he is proudly from Massachusetts-yet he is eager to collaborate with the Spanish slave-trading captain Don Benito to get his human cargo back on route to its destination. Both aspects of Captain Delano's behavior are extremely peculiar, because they directly contradict his own class interests. Like the gray fog that opens the story, Delano's mind is clouded by whiteness, and this manifests itself in a series of absurd judgments that put his own life in constant peril.

However, these two aspects of Delano's peculiar behavior in response to the African mutiny on board the San Dominick are difficult to recognize by readers who themselves are caught up in the white fog. Thus Melville's inversion in "Benito Cereno" has to do with the total scale of white identity: as a social control formation it is endowed with the blinding power to distort and neutralize the oldest and most recognizable of human conflicts-class struggle. So instead of a thrilling narrative of mutiny at sea-oppressed against oppressor-white readers get a racial narrative of themselves. It is no wonder that "Benito Cereno" was unpopular when it was first published, and that a 1950 biography of Melville, winner of the National Book Award, dismissed the story as "weak and disappointing" (Arkin, 240). In short form, this is how Melville's white racial narrative unfolds.

First, clear signs of class conflict are reflexively racialized, thereby denuding them of their own historical reality and the possibilities for social transformation inherent in any such clash of class antagonists. One of the first scenes observed by Captain Delano upon boarding the San Dominick is of African captives, unshackled, sharpening hatchets. Delano queries Don Benito about the "hatchet-polishers." "'And these Ashantee conjurers here,'" he asks, "'this seems a curious business they are at, Don Benito?'" Don Benito gives a pat answer, doubtless rehearsed at knifepoint prior to the San Dominick's inevitable encounter at sea with another vessel such as Captain Delano's. He tells Delano that a terrible storm had damaged the hatchets; his order is for the African captives to salvage them. "A prudent idea," responds Delano, alluding to the duty of the owner of property to protect it. Which leads Delano to ask, for the first time, about the human property on board the San Dominick. Don Benito explains that the African captives are the property of his best friend, Alexandro Aranda, of whom Don Benito cannot seem to speak due to Aranda's sudden death during their voyage, which Don Benito attributes to "the fever."