Mixed Race Studies

Race Passing and American Individualism

University of Massachusetts Press
February 2003
176 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand)

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture

In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for white embody a paradox. By virtue of the “one drop” rule that long governed the nation’s race relations, they are legally black. Yet the color of their skin makes them visibly-and therefore socially-white.

In this book, Kathleen Pfeiffer explores the implications of this dilemma by analyzing its treatment in the fiction of six writers: William Dean Howells, Frances E. W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Although passing for white has sometimes been viewed as an expression of racial self-hatred or disloyalty, Pfeiffer argues that the literary evidence is much more ambiguous than that. Rather than indicating a denial of “blackness” or co-optation by the dominant white culture, passing can be viewed as a form of self-determination consistent with American individualism. In their desire to manipulate personal identity in order to achieve social acceptance and upward mobility, light-skinned blacks who pass for white are no different than those Americans who reinvent themselves in terms of class, religion, or family history.

In Pfeiffer’s view, to see race passing as a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of individualism is to invite richer and more complex readings of a broad range of literary texts. More than that, it represents a challenge to the segregationist logic of the “one drop” rule and, as such, subverts the ideology of racial essentialism.

A New Look At The Life Of Jean Toomer

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2010-12-30

Robert Siegel, Host

Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Emory University

Jean Toomer received much acclaim for his portrait of African-American life in the early 20th century in his 1923 book Cane. The Harlem Renaissance author wrote vivid vignettes in a series of poems and short stories in the book. Next week, the book will be re-released with a new introduction written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates and Emory University scholar Rudolph Byrd. In the 70-page introduction, the two scholars write that Toomer, a light-skinned black man of mixed heritage, chose to live much of his life as a black man passing as white. NPR’s Robert Siegel talks with Byrd about the life of Toomer.

Jean Toomer was a writer whose 1923 book “Cane” wove poetry, prose and drama into its glimpses of African-American life in the early 20th century. “Cane” earned him a place among the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and a new edition of the book has a different take on Toomer’s life.

Toomer was a light-skinned man who spoke of himself as being neither white nor black. Well, two scholars of African-American literature, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard and Professor Rudolph Byrd of Emory University contribute an introduction to the new book, which is to be published next week.

And they conclude that Toomer – his writings notwithstanding – lived much of his life as a black man passing for white. Their investigation is one of both textual criticism and genealogical research.

Professor Byrd joins us now. Professor Gates is not with us because his father, Henry Louis Gates Sr., passed away this week, and we send our condolences.

Professor Byrd, welcome to the program.

Professor RUDOLPH BYRD (African-American Studies, Emory University): Mr. Siegel, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

SIEGEL: And your conclusions are based on both facts and a reading of those facts. First, what did you find out?

Prof. BYRD: Oh, the newly unearthed facts are in census records. There’s a draft registration and his marriage license. The census records list Toomer as white. The draft registrations record Toomer as Negro. And then, the marriage license lists both the bride and groom as white.

What is fascinating about these findings is that, first of all, this is information that has been overlooked, and so it adds an important dimension to the long speculation about Toomer’s racial ancestry, which really began with the publication of “Cane” in 1923.

SIEGEL: Now, Toomer, in writings, distanced himself from the label Negro.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: But he did speak of lots of different blood that flowed in his veins.

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: And he described himself as someone who had spent some years of his life – as they said in the day – in colored schools…

Prof. BYRD: Yes.

SIEGEL: …and many years living as white.

Is that accurate? Is his description of how he grew up accurate?

Prof. BYRD: It is and it isn’t. He did attend Henry Highland Garnet School, which was a black school. He did attend Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, which was a black school…

Read the article here.  Listen to the interview (00:05:44) here.

Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White

New York Times
2010-12-26

Felicia R. Lee

Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”…

…Toomer’s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd’s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition — and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive — but that Toomer never “passed” in the classic sense of pretending to be white. Rather, he said, Toomer (whose appearance was racially indeterminate) sought to transcend standard definitions of race.

“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press…

…Yet this new edition of “Cane” documents that over the course of his life Toomer variously denied ever living as a black person; called himself racially mixed; and said he was a new kind of American, transcending old racial terms. Toomer did not want to be featured as a Negro in the marketing of “Cane” and later did not want his work included in black anthologies…

Read the entire article here.

American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression

Purdue University
2004
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3166693
ISBN: 9780542022999

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjust Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography. This dissertation suggests that these mixed race literary texts, as well as the multiracial experiences, sensibilities, themes, and expressions communicated therein, differ from traditional conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race in American society, history, and literature that are based on the logic of the binary racial system. Mixed race literature attempts to phrase and communicate suppressed, distorted, and/or neglected multiracial experiences, sensibilities, and possibilities. Mixed race literature is also coextensive with the emergence of the multiracial social formation and movement in the post-civil rights era. “Precursors” to mixed race literature fall short in their attempt to phrase and to communicate complexities and experiences of mixed race lived existence. I read Jean Toomer’s Cane as one of the most significant precursors to mixed race literature in American literature. Mixed race literature also differs from “mixed race in American literature” insofar as the later, in the presentation of mixed race characters and themes, both relies on and validates the categorical, hierarchical, and dichotomous logic of the binary racial system. Notable examples in the canon of American and American Ethnic literature are William Faulkner and Toni Morrison who, from a mixed race perspective, extend and promote in their texts the suppression and distortion of multiracial complexities, possibilities, and lived realities in the service of the binary racial system.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Chapter One: Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era: A Personal Narrative Essay
  • The Summer of 1999
  • Growing up Racially Mixed in the 1970s and 1980s
  • Negotiating Raciated University in the 1990s
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two: Cane and Jean Toomer: Percursors, American Mixed Race Literature
• Chapter Three: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia: A Novel About Growing Up Racially Mixed and Becoming Multiracial in the Post-Civil Rights Era
• Chapter Four: American Mixed Race Ficiational Autobiographies: Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets
• List of References
• Vita

Purchase the dissertation here.

“A Little Yellow Bastard Boy”: Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes’s “Mulatto”

Robert Paul Lamb, Professor of English
Purdue University

College Literature
Volume, 35, Number 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 126-153
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2008.0012

When Langston Hughes published “Mulatto” in his second poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), it was highly praised by both African American and white reviewers. But because it did not seem germane to the heated controversy caused by that volume—over whether the blues were an acceptable poetic form and whether Hughes’s vernacular representations of African Americans were genuine or else racialist stereotypes—“Mulatto” has been mostly ignored by scholars ever since. This richly complex poem demands to be read in several contexts: Hughes’s difficult relationship with his own father, his lifelong near obsession with biracialism, and the poem’s deliberate intertextuality with Jean Toomer’s Cane. Most important, Hughes’s intricate and innovative employment of African American cultural aesthetics—call and response, signifying, and the blues—is essential to any meaningful reading of what is one of the finest poems ever written on the biracial experience in America.

Read or purchase the article here.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

New York University Press
2004-02-01
675 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781432
Paperback ISBN: 9780814781449

Edited by

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus’ ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O’Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004
pages 149-180
E-ISSN: 1534-7303
Print ISSN: 0040-4691
DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in “The Blue Meridian” (1936) has its precursor in Cane’s closing chapter, the short drama “Kabnis,” and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. Kabnis’s ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—”; “And black,” retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there “Aint much difference between blue and black” (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a…

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Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies

Southern Quarterly
Volume 41, Number 1 (Fall 2003)
pages 39-52

Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English
University of Florida

In the paper I investigate a certain kind of imaginative response, especially on the part of mixed-race artists, to the prevalence of racialized discourses of modernity and nationalism in the Americas. Such discourses often dominated public thought in the Americas in general; more specifically for my purposes, I will be looking at the work of two artists, in Harlem and Mexico City, between the 1920s and the 1940s. In negotiating their own sense of a particularly mixed-race and thoroughly modern American nationalism, the United States mulatto writer Jean Toomer (1895-1967) and the Mexican mestiza painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) each would try to imagine an organic fusion-one which saw the fusion presumably inherent in race-mixing as a practice of hybridization and/ or grafting. Such a fusion was, further, imagined as a coming together of a (largely imaginary) time and space of primitive energies with the energies of modernity. As William Carlos Williams conceived it, to hybridize or to marry, as he put it in his 1925 In the American Grain, would be the only “moral” way to “fertilize . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize” (121). For artists and intellectuals in the United States who saw that the 1920s presented a crossroads in how the US would define itself as “American,” people like Williams, the writer Waldo Frank, and even many intellectuals of color such as Toomer felt indeed that cultural, if not also racial, fusion might be the “crosspollenizing” way out of the seeming sterility of an ever-deepening divide along the color line. For Mexican artists and intellectuals at a time of intense nation building, given that race and cultural mixing in Mexico were already an unavoidable fact, the idea of hybridity, that is mestizaje (Indo-Hispanic mixing), of necessity became the watchword for a new and unified Mexican nation. At a time when eugenics science generally characterized race-mixing as productive only of degenerate or sterile offspring, Kahlo and Toomer, and others like them, would effect this imaginative unification, fusion, and cross-pollenization by means of a eugenic counter-discourse which privileged race (and cultural) mixing as productive of hybrid, and therefore stronger, cultures and, ultimately, nations. If we remember the fascination that genetic, eugenic, and evolutionary theories held for both North and South Americans in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it begins to make sense that such an idea of cultural and racial hybridity ultimately would give rise to a very general notion that North must fuse in some way with South, given the tendency to divide the United States and Mexico into “North” and “South,” a division which often imaginatively paralleled the industrial/agricultural divide assigned to these same regions in the United States itself. For Toomer in the United States, this fusion would involve a literally organic connection between the urban North and the agrarian South. For Kahlo and her husband, the artist and muralist Diego Rivera, the fusion would often be envisioned in terms of an agrarian Mexico (South) with an industrial United States (North)…

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Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 64, Number 4, Winter 2008
E-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610
DOI: 10.1353/arq.0.0025

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Even though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that by 1915 the one-drop rule had been accepted by both blacks and whites in the North and South (109). Hence, mixed bloods with visible traces of blackness, including members of the former mulatto elite, would be judged as black by both blacks and whites. At best, they could be “in some way, satisfyingly black”. In this article, I put forward a reading of Toomer and Cane that explains his fascination with miscegenation in terms of his hope for what was possible in America. Specifically, his unique and solitary position vis-à-vis the New Negro in Black Washington and the Young American in White Manhattan provided him with the reasons, models, and ideals to believe that, in Cane, he could effectively voice and sketch out a mixed race sensibility and community that would be grasped and appreciated by the American public. However, in the process of writing Cane, he came face to face with the rigid categories and limits of the black-white color line in the Jim Crow era, which rendered unintelligible and unsustainable in the culture at large the mixed race sensibility and community he sought to express and develop. In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s Young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists…

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