The Chocolate People
Identity is personal. Society keeps trying to make it administrative.
The Chocolate People turns its attention toward the categories people create to explain one another—and the strange confidence with which those categories become social reality.
Race, class, culture, appearance, expectation, belonging, and respectability become parts of a larger system in which individuals are constantly interpreted before they have finished explaining themselves.
Labels can create solidarity. They can also create assumptions. Communities can provide belonging while establishing their own rules about who belongs correctly, who represents the group, and whose behavior becomes everybody else’s responsibility.
The more society insists on simplifying people, the more complicated the people themselves become.
Through social observation, satire, humor, and cultural contradiction, the novel examines the distance between identity as lived experience and identity as something assigned, marketed, interpreted, defended, or judged by everyone else.
The Chocolate People is a story about belonging, categorization, culture, race, social expectation, and the endlessly human desire to decide what other people mean.
