The short story, "The Comet", by W. E. B. DuBois. In the work, a comet wipes out all of humanity, or so the 2 protagonists, the girl from a privileged white background, and the male, from a socioeconomically-disadvantaged AA background, think. Because they believe that there is no one around them, the two become rid of society's impositions, and thus, a romance blossoms. But alas, the family of the respective couple returns, grounding the two back into their previous circumstance.

DuBois uses this hypothetical scenario to illustrate how there are rules that the individual blindly follows because of those around them. The girl, Julia (if I remember correctly), has a fiancé and family friends who express hatred towards the AA diaspora, and the man, Jim Davis, is repeatedly shown to be scorn and valued as disposable by the populace (the only reason that he even survives the comet is because of a potentially life-ending trek into an underground bank vault).

With those around the individual gone, the rules are gone too, so the bird is no longer caged, so to speak. I thought this perspective on race was pretty interesting, so I did an essay on it for an English course that I took in my freshman year of college.