How does Chester Himes use imagery in If He Hollers Let Him Go: A Novel?

Over the centuries, the concept of "dark" in Western thought and imagery has for the most part come to represent evil, corruption, decay, mystery, or baseness, while the concept of "light" has come to represent good, integrity, life, truth, and idealism.
Throughout the book, these entwined preconceptions manifest thematically and
dramatically in several ways. The first is perhaps the most obvious, in the tension
between the so-called black ("dark") and white ("light") races. Fear and anger and
resentment are all triggered, the narrative suggests, because of the very presence of blackness (in the form of black people) in society.

The second manifestation of the dark/light dichotomy is somewhat less obvious, but no less vividly defined. This is the perception that lighter blackness (that is, paler skin tone in the blacks) is a positive, while darker skin tone is a negative; in other words, them closer to white, the better. Third, there is the blackness of ignorance, unbroken by the light of wisdom and/or insight, that exists in all the characters, black and white alike.

Finally, there is implied darkness, the surging, shadowy, subconscious truths at the core of Robert Jones's dreams, which come at night, the time when there is no light.
In short, while other philosophies and perspectives portray and/or understand blackness in spiritually positive terms as, for example, sources of fertility, the novel defines blackness, from the perspective of both blacks and whites, in traditional Western terms as a negative, a source of unsettled distortion of honest human relationships, with both the self and others.