Was Gatsby Actually Black? As Novel Turns 100, One East Bay English Class Makes the Case

A high school English class in the East Bay has advanced a boundary-pushing interpretation of a Great American Novel.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a master class for students learning about the American Dream, was published 100 years ago on April 10. Meanwhile, a group of students at Bentley, a private school with campuses in Oakland and Lafayette, have collaborated on the theory that the novel’s title character, Jay Gatsby, is actually a Black man passing as white.

“I thought it gave the book a bigger dimension,” said Mimi Mikhailov, a senior at Bentley. “It no longer becomes just a novel about the American Dream.”

The Great Gatsby remains a staple of American fiction — partly because America can’t stop talking about it. Set in the Roaring Twenties, and just about 100 pages long, it’s ideal for high school students’ short attention spans. Each generation also seems to get an adaptation, with varying degrees of success — a stiff 1974 film starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow; in 2013, movie director Baz Luhrmann used hip-hop to depict the Jazz Age; and most recently, a Tony-winning musical premiered on Broadway.

In all these versions, Gatsby is white. So an academic exercise about this character’s race should not come entirely out of left field, according to Bentley English teacher Richard Gabri.

“I could not fathom how the Great American Novel would be about class and not race, ” Gabri said.

Close reading

Before he started teaching the novel, Gabri, 54, had only read it once, when he himself was in high school. He said the story of Gatsby, a mysterious self-made man pining for another man’s wife in wealthy Long Island, New York, has more to offer through a contemporary lens of race.

Gabri and his students, who served as research assistants, considered Fitzgerald’s letters and existing academic writing on the topic. Their efforts resulted in a comparative analysis drawing on references to Joseph Conrad’s The Children of the Sea, a maritime story about a Black sailor.

Gabri submitted the resulting article to the academic journal English Literary History: “All White in The End: From the Passage of James Wait to the Passing of James Gatz; Intertextuality and the Riddle of Race in The Great Gatsby” is expected to publish in 2026.

In 2024, he and his students presented their argument at the American Literature Association’s annual conference in Chicago. Mikhailov said the story works when it goes beyond the usual reading about class and consumerism in the United States.

“It becomes a novel about how we all pass,” she said. “We all pass as straight or queer or Black or white and in all these different facets.”

Her peer, Theo Weiss, a senior at Bentley, said the presentation generated plenty of questions, but he and his classmates stood their ground.

“Being able to push back against that criticism, I thought it was fun,” he said.

A key piece of scholarship that informed Gabri’s essay is the 2004 book The Tragic Black Buck: Racial Masquerading in the American Literary Imagination by Carlyle Van Thompson, an English professor at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. His research explores the social and historical context of the 1920s, such as the Great Migration, the eugenics movement and the rise of white supremacy.

“You go along with the common discourse that it’s all only about the white poor boy marrying the rich girl, trying to get her back — that’s a surface reading,” Carlyle said. “You gotta go in-depth.”

Carlyle said his essay about Gatsby created shockwaves when it was published. But it made clear the racial divide within academia between the kinds of works that Black and white scholars are willing to dissect.

“Most white scholars don’t know the intricacies of racial passage, and most Black scholars focus on African American texts. So you got those two dynamics going on simultaneously,” Carlyle said.

Literary politics

The discourse over Gatsby’s race has been ongoing for years. Janet Savage, a California writer and attorney, released her 2017 book Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface. A 2023 essay in The Atlantic meditated on the value of teaching race in Gatsby; the writer Alonzo Vereen claimed that it’s more important to view Gatsby as “unraced.”

Michael Nowlin, chair of the English department at the University of Victoria in Canada, has studied race in Fitzgerald’s works. He casts doubt on the analyses by Van Thompson and Savage.

“There are undoubtedly plenty of what Thompson calls racial signifiers in The Great Gatsby, but his and Savage’s readings of some of them (or words and phrases they take to be racial signifiers) can be wildly strained in the interests of defending their thesis,” Nowlin wrote in The Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Carlyle said he’s excited that teenagers, Gatsby’s core demographic for years, are trying to reimagine the classic in a provocative way. It’s not lost on the Lafayette high school students that their effort, which started in tenth grade, now carries additional weight as the Trump administration has targeted D.E.I. programs and historical framings involving race.

Bentley student Theo Weiss points out the rise of this reactionary movement — the so-called “woke right.”

“Our generation has had a lot of interaction with cancel culture on the left, and now what feels like a realer cancel culture on the right against people’s ideas of diversity,” Weiss said. “I do think we need to continue resisting this.”

Regardless of anyone’s take on The Great Gatsby, one thing is sure. Fitzgerald managed to tell a story that, despite its Prohibition-Era trappings, can still reflect current issues and capture the imagination — “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”