Robert Johnson, like Iola, is mixed raced and comes across multiple opportunities to denounce his “blackness” as a way to better his social and political standing.
As a literate former slave, Robert epitomizes education as a tool for the upward mobility of the black race. When he escapes enslavement to serve in the Union ranks, Robert surprises the white generals with his education and leadership abilities.
Robert not only represents the signification of education, or lack there of within this novel, but according to scholar, Michael Borgstrom, Robert’s character also upholds and represents a racial and cultural pride emphasized by his peculiar situation in choosing his racial identity.
“Despite his own light skin, he refuses to pass as white. At the suggestion that he pass to further his career in the Union army, for example, Robert notes that for him personal ambition is less important than assisting black America as a whole: 'When a man's been colored all his life it comes a little hard for him to get white all at once,' " he tells us. "'Were I to try it, I would feel like a cat in a strange garret'(43)"
(Borgstrom 783).
Borgstrom’s theory that “the novel links Robert's subsequent heroism in the war directly to his "racial identity" is extremely useful because it sheds light on the difficult problem of protection.
Just as in fighting in a war against your own country, you are left unprotected on that battlefield by the country who put you there; the same concept applies when Robert makes the brave choice to stand with the black race, which too, is unprotected as we see through the evidence that Harper provides us within this novel.