Barn Burning', a short story by William Faulkner, deals with class conflicts between the whites, the violence of Abner Snopes, and his son, Sarty's initiation into manhood. Unlike previous studies on this short story, this study aims to explore the blackness of the poor whites and Sarty's 'passing for a black son.' It also explores how white landowners develop their masculine identities and how Sarty becomes 'the artificial nigger' who stands for the racial others against whom Abner defines himself. Abner endeavors to teach his son as a guide in the postbellum New South by revealing the injustices of the sharecropping system. Abner also teaches his son to keep his own masculinity in the racially charged environments of the South. He sees the old Southern identities slipping away as the racial boundaries of black and white begin to dissolve. While indoctrinating his son into racial ideologies, Abner employs not only the father/son relationship but also the master/slave dialectics in his relationship with Sarty. He wants to buttress his white male superiority and patriarchal position in the New South. Sarty, to be a loyal son to his father, chooses to be 'a strange nigger' to tell the truth to Major de Spain. His choice to be a artificial nigger, however, results in homelessness and in white diaspora. Twenty years later Sarty reminds of these years and narrates the story in a diaspora consciousness showing his pity for his father and justifying his runaway from his father. In short, through Sarty's 'passing for a black son,' Faulkner wants to show that the masculinity of a poor white father in the New South is deeply related with racism and classism.