"Mr. Z"

"Mr. Z"
by M. Carl Holman

My answer to question 3:
The author's attitude toward Mr. Z seems disapproving or disappointed to me.  "Or when he could not cleanly skirt dissension,/ Faced up to the dilemma, firmly seized/ Whatever ground was Anglo-Saxonized" (Holman).  The author is saying that when Mr. Z could not avoid confrontation or taking a side, he went with whatever a white person would do.  He doesn't care if its right or wrong, or if he even believes in it, he just wants to act white.  The author points out how much Mr. Z had to go through in his life, nothing every little detail Mr. Z controlled or changed about himself.  The extreme detail seems overkill, and the effort on the part of Mr. Z was all for naught:  "Not one false note was struck- until he died..." (Holman)
Also shown in these quotes is the author's satirizing of Mr. Z's society.  Mr. Z was told early that having different skin was a sign of error, and when he tried to change, act more like a white person, he was more accepted and successful in his community.  Society taught him that conformity, along with abandonment of his culture and background, was a good thing.  But still, in his obituary, even after complimenting him with the word, "distinguished," the writers still added the phrase, "of his race," making it painfully obvious that nothing Mr. Z could have done would make people forget that he was African American.