More on the question of race in Faulkner's Light in August

The central character in Faulkner's Light in August (1932) is the auspiciously named Joe Christmas; perhaps a million term papers have latched onto the obvious symbolism and called JC a Christ figure - but I think he's anything but that. In effect he's closer to the wandering Jew, the outcast, someone living in the deeply divided society of the segregated South and of uncertain racial ancestry - in fact he has no idea of his parentage (we learn that his late mother was white and that his father worked in a circus - but nothing of his race). JC can pass for white and often does, but at other times he identifies w/ the black community and is himself identified as black - particularly when he becomes the prime suspect in the murder of an older white woman who lives just outside the town (Jefferson, in WF's fictional world) and who has devoted her life to the cause of "Negro" education. Once JC is connected to this crime he is to all the (white) people in town a "nigger." In some ways this show how race as a concept is slippery and elusive and imposed from the outside rather than any innate quality - making the obvious mistreatment of blacks that we see throughout this novel (and not, I believe, atypical for its era) all the more repulsive and cruel. JC never had a chance in life, but once he's identified as a black man he is exiled and doomed; but what about the many others, living in poverty, deprived of education, illiterate for the most part - they never had a chance in the world (this is highlighted when we see late in the novel the near illiteracy as well of "Joe Brown" aka Burch - he had avenues and opportunities open to him and his word is credible, even though he himself is just marginally literate - but he's a white man). There's a sense throughout this novel of an unjust social hierarchy unlikely to change for generations; Faulkner's no proselytizer, but I think the social criticism in this novel has a sharper edge than that in any of his other works. But LiA is hardly a polemic, either; much of its strength comes from the other characters central to the plot: Lena, traveling in search of the father of her to-be-born child, and Byran Bunch, who falls in love w/ Lena; in the beautiful final chapter we see them embarking from Jefferson, and we never know if Lena catches up with the scoundrel who dumped her twice (unlikely) or whether she will fall in love w/ or at least agree to marry the much older sweet and timid Burch (the name-similarity is central to the plot). These sketched in characters, especially Lena, give a sense in the novel of somehow goodness or at least benevolence enduring, carrying on - despite the horrors we see regarding JC's fate; this is a sense familiar throughout WF's work (Sound and Fury - Dilsy, As I Lay Dying) but resented here in an exceptional well-constructed plot and with just enough (well, sometimes too much) of WF's literary flourishes (could do w/out the impenetrable penultimate chapter on the fallen minister, Hightower).