Mixed-Race Leaders and the Monoracial Ideal
“The Power of Blackness” began as a speculative essay, published in a volume called Racial Thinking in the United States along with essays by historians and sociologists charting the contours of American racial ideas. Upon its publication in 2004, the essay attracted considerable criticism for suggesting that multiracial people who adopted uncomplicated Black identities were passing for Black. Passing, the critics said, occurred when a “really” Black person (who had mixed parentage) passed for White. If the same person identified as Black, then he or she was just being who he or she was. Passing, in the critics’ view, was racial fraud and betrayal of one’s proper relationship to Black America.
In the years since this essay first appeared, it has become less controversial. That Walter White, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others chose to pass as Black has come to be seen as unremarkable. That Jean Toomer’s identity was complex and contingent is no longer viewed as psychosis or racial betrayal on his part. Time and experience with the multiracial idea have changed how we see these things.
Four of the most prominent African American political and cultural leaders of the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth—W. E. B. Du Bois, historian, sociologist, cofounder of the NAACP, editor of the Crisis, and pan-Africanist leader; Jean Toomer, herald of the Harlem Renaissance; Walter White, novelist and NAACP executive secretary; and Frederick Douglass, antislavery firebrand and African America’s first national leader—had mixed racial ancestry, at least Black and White and perhaps also Native American. They, and others like them, were members of what one might call the beigeoisie—that coterie of light-skinned, multiracial people who formed an elite upper class within African American society in the generations after slavery.1 All but Douglass might have passed for White had they chosen to do so. Instead, all—with the revealing exception of Jean Toomer—consistently chose to pass for Black. I use the phrase “pass for Black” advisedly. Reginald Daniel argues that passing was a strategy used by people of mixed ancestry to take advantage of their phenotypical ambiguity to acquire a measure of White privilege—to “pass” for White. That is the sense in which the term passing has ordinarily been used. But if the student of such matters is balanced conceptually, then he or she will admit that people of mixed ancestry who presented themselves in public as Black were passing, too.2 This essay is a meditation on why some multiracial people made the choice to adopt a Black social and political identity—to pass for Black—and what implications their choice has for the construction of race (at least, of Black and White) in this period in American history.3
A few matters should be clarified at the outset. The first concerns the issue of choice. Often a choice is not entirely freely made. So we must ask, to what extent did these individuals choose a public racial identity, and to what extent was their choice constrained by circumstance? Passing for White may have been a choice, but it came with a cost. One had to be wealthy enough or desperate enough to move away from family and friends, or else one risked exposure and collapse of the life one was attempting to build. One had to be psychologically strong enough or scarred enough to abandon a former identity, the comforts of kin, and familiar surroundings. One had to have the education or the skill or the luck to be able to make a living in the world of White people. Passing for Black was the choice dictated by the dominant racial ideology. The power of racial ideologies lies in their very power to deny us absolutely free choices. Each of the persons discussed here made a choice to identify as Black. For some, this was an act with a substantial element of freedom; they could have made another choice. For others, the choice was more constrained. In each case, I have examined the writings of the individual and the work of biographers to try to ascertain the pattern in their choosing of public and private racial identities.
Second, there has been a long history of racial mixing in the United States. Several historians have observed that during the early colonial period there was more interracial mating than at any later time in American history. White slave masters took Black slave concubines, Black freemen married White women, and so forth. Such practices continued, often without widespread public acknowledgment, throughout the slavery period.4 Some have asserted that early in US history the lines of race and class were not so rigid as they later became. For example, it has frequently been alleged that Alexander Hamilton was of mixed Black and White descent. Hamilton was born to a White mother, the product of an adulterous affair, on the West Indian island of Nevis in 1755. When Hamilton rose to the heights of American government in the early years of the republic, his political opponents sometimes alleged his mother’s paramour had been Black or mulatto in an attempt to discredit Hamilton in a White-dominant society—a difficult charge to refute given the blurred racial lines in the islands in the era of his birth. If indeed Hamilton had African ancestry, then he was a racially mixed person who reached the highest levels of society as White.5
Whatever the merits of the stories about Hamilton’s parentage and however much flexibility may have existed in the racial system of the eighteenth century, it is clear that by the end of the nineteenth century the options afforded a multiracial person were more limited. Many authors have observed that there were places in the South under slavery where elements of racial mixedness were recognized.6 Yet, as Joel Williamson argues convincingly, in the period 1850–1915 American society at large came to embrace that peculiarity, the one-drop rule. To ensure the racial hierarchy as slavery came under attack and was eclipsed, White people began to reckon as Black any person who had known African ancestry, no matter how remote, and free people of mixed race were pushed into an externally undifferentiated Black class. Williamson asserts:
The period between 1850 and 1915 marked a grand changeover in race relations in America…. A long-running intolerance of miscegenation and mulattoes among whites in the upper South joined with the rising and crystallizing intolerance among whites in the lower South to exert tremendous pressures upon both whites and mulattoes. Whites who mixed found themselves abused and ostracized. Under heavy fire from a seemingly universal racism, the previous ambivalence of mulattoes toward both whites and blacks turned during the Civil War toward a steadily growing affinity with blacks…. [T]he engagement of mulattoes and blacks was firmly cemented, though obvious vestiges of a preference for lightness lingered for two or three generations. By the 1920s the great mass of mulattoes saw their destiny as properly united only with that of their darker brothers and sisters. They saw themselves as fusing with blacks and together forming a whole people in embryo…. Negroes accepted the blackness of the seemingly pure white … and of others strikingly light—they too accepted the one-drop rule.7
Over those decades, this binary Black-White construction hardened as a keystone of the ideology of White supremacy. The creation of the one-drop rule required a substantial assault on what might have been known about people’s genealogies. The US population, whatever its monoracial labels, was in fact a mixed multitude, with a substantial amount of mixing between White and Black and between both of those and Native peoples. But multiracial ancestry was a fact that White supremacists wanted to forget and one whose memory they strove to eradicate. The notion became entrenched, across the color line, that place in society was bound to race and that racial difference was timeless and immutable. Not only the European Americans who asserted dominance but also the people of African ancestry who were dominated by the system came to view it, not as a political construction, but as an unquestioned biological fact: White people, it was agreed by all, were unmixed; mixed people were deemed to be Black. This taking on of the dominant group’s racial ideology by the subordinate people is an example of what Antonio Gramsci termed “hegemony”—that domination so thorough that one knows not that one is dominated but thinks it the natural order of things.8
Nearly all of the people who informed W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the Talented Tenth and who populate Willard Gatewood’s study of aristocrats of color fell into this category: Black-identified people of mixed European and African (and perhaps Native American) ancestry, many of whom could have passed for White had their Black ancestry not been known and had they chosen to do so.9 This essay makes a start at understanding how the multiracial fact (their ancestry) encountered the monoracial fact (their identity) in the lives and the minds of some such people, who were prominent Black intellectuals and political leaders. I am emphatically not arguing that it was their admixture of European ancestry that brought such people to prominence. In slavery, being the master’s child may have brought some privilege, education, even manumission. In freedom, White descent may have brought some social advantage. But there is no evidence, contrary to the opinions of both Du Bois and Edward Byron Reuter, that White ancestry brought greater ability.10 Here, then, are their stories and some observations.
W. E. B. DU BOIS
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was one of the most famous African Americans of the early decades of the twentieth century and is the figure most admired by the last two generations of intellectuals. Du Bois was racially mixed, although the mixing had taken place some generations back in his ancestral past. Du Bois’s forebears were Africans, French Huguenots, and Hudson Valley Dutch. His father, Alfred, born in Haiti, was so light and smooth-haired as to be able to live as White.
In Dusk of Dawn, one of several autobiographies, Du Bois wrote fondly of his childhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where his playmates were White, he attended a White church, and he was culturally “quite thoroughly New England,” unconscious of race. His mother’s family had resided in western Massachusetts for more than a century. “Living with my mother’s people I absorbed their culture patterns and these were not African so much as Dutch and New England,” he wrote. “The speech was an idiomatic New England tongue with no African dialect; the family customs were New England, and the sex mores.”11 Then, he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, a schoolhouse snub by a White girl brought him to a sudden consciousness of his Blackness: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt.” He vowed to spend his life outdoing those who lived beyond that veil.12 When Du Bois, still a proud son of New England, applied for admission to Harvard he was turned down. He went instead to Fisk University, a Black college in Nashville that was engaged mainly in turning out teachers for Black schools in the rural South. Du Bois was one such teacher during the summers. In other autobiographical writings, Du Bois located the critical era in the development of a Black consciousness in his college years at Fisk.13
According to his biographers, Du Bois remained in conflict about his racial identity even while he proclaimed his Blackness. Citing Rayford W. Logan and E. Franklin Frazier—two Du Bois disciples—David Levering Lewis wrote:
Du Bois insisted … that he had embraced his racial identity only at Fisk. “Henceforward I was a Negro,” Du Bois would proclaim, and then soar into a grand vision of his place in the race, knowing full well that Anglo-Saxon America was objectively blind by custom and law to intermediate racial categories. Logan always said that Du Bois’s claim of belated racial self-discovery was a polemical contrivance to give greater punch to his writings about race relations. To claim that his identity as a Negro was in some sense the exercise of an option, an existential commitment, was to define Willie’s celebration of and struggle for his people as an act of the greatest nobility and philanthropy. He was a Negro not because he had to be—was born immutably among them—but because he had embraced the qualities of that splendid race and the moral superiority of its cause…. Willie’s feelings about race in these early years were more labile or tangled, not to say conflictive, than his public professions revealed [He wrote] diary entries flashing over Franco-Caribbean roots like far-off lightning, enhancing a lordly sense of self. Willie’s racial shape in his last year at Fisk was still congealing, and it would always be an alloy, never entirely pure…. Willie’s ambivalence endowed him with a resilient superiority complex, and … his lifelong espousal of the “Darker World” was an optional commitment based above all upon principles and reason, rather than a dazzling advocacy he was born into.14
The most famous passage from Du Bois’s writings expresses ambivalence about mixedness.
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.15
Formally, this passage is about the tension between a unitary African American racial identity and an ambiguous civic identity as an American whose citizenship is not fully credited. Here Du Bois does not speak directly to the racial ambiguity his other writings reveal. Yet might it be that, behind the veil of that formal duality, Du Bois was also questioning monoracial Blackness? Could his sensitivity to “this longing … to merge his double self into a better and truer self” have been shaped by a racial double consciousness? I have not yet located the private documents that would settle this question definitively, yet certain published writings are suggestive.
Fig. 8.1.
W. E. B. Du Bois in Sisters Chapel, Spelman College, February 1938. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Fig. 8.2.
A darkened, stylized view of W. E. B. Du Bois. Portrait by Laura Wheeler Waring. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Throughout Dusk of Dawn, which Du Bois revealingly subtitled An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, he was careful to note both African and White ancestries and mark the color of each character. Othello Berghardt was his “very dark grandfather,” his grandmother Sally Burghardt “a thin, tall, yellow, and hawk-faced woman.” His mother, Mary Sylvina, “was brown and rather small with smooth skin and lovely eyes, and hair that curled and crinkled.” His father, Alfred, was “a light mulatto.” Stories and an elaborate genealogical chart laid out all the ancestors Du Bois knew and highlighted the race of the White ones.16
Fig. 8.3.
A view of W. E. B. Du Bois darkened for the cover of an important biography of the great man. Portrait by Addison N. Scurlock. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Du Bois elaborated his thinking about racial construction and mixedness in a chapter titled “The Concept of Race.”17 As he did in much of his writing, here Du Bois presented his personal struggles as emblematic of the struggles of the African American people. He proclaimed the racial binary: “I was born in the century when the walls of race were clear and straight; when the world consisted of mutually exclusive races; and even though the edges might be blurred, there was no question of exact definition and understanding of the meaning of the word.” Yet most of his discussion surrounding that proclamation was not binary; it was, rather, an embrace of multiplicity. He went on at length about his White ancestry. He noted his cousins who lived as White. And in the same sentence in which he stated his strongest affirmation of solidarity with Africa, he also asserted that “this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas.”18
Surely, no African American intellectual was more unambiguously Black than W. E. B. Du Bois. And none was more expressive of multiplicity. Yet recent generations of readers and writers, in contemplating Du Bois, have seen only the monoracial Black and not the embrace of multiplicity. This monoracial assumption has gone so far that often paintings and photographs of Du Bois are darkened and stylized to emphasize African-derived features and minimize the European-derived aspects of Du Bois’s countenance. The first picture below shows Du Bois untinted: a beige man who could easily pass for Italian or Spanish. The second, a portrait of Du Bois by Laura Wheeler Waring, shows the same angular features but kinkier hair and sepia skin tones, highlighting a stylized Africanity. The third, very dark indeed, is from the cover of Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography. It is as if Du Bois, in order to stand in the role of honored Black intellectual and political forebear, must be presented as darker than he was in real life.19
JEAN TOOMER
Jean Toomer was an icon of Blackness who embodied racial multiplicity—indeed, who changed his race, more than once. No more powerful or controversial figure exists in Black letters. Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in 1894, he grew to adolescence in the Washington home and psychic shadow of his grandfather P. B. S. Pinchback. Pinchback served as governor and was elected US senator in Louisiana during Reconstruction. He won on the strength of Black votes and his constituents’ understanding that, though born the free son of a White planter, he possessed slave ancestry.20
Toomer’s identity was flexible. Born Nathan, he changed his name to Eugene in childhood and Jean later. He attended high school among Washington’s light, bright, and almost White African American upper class. The young Jean Toomer identified as Black but traveled socially on the White side of the line nearly as much as on the Black. He then flitted through several colleges without telling anyone about his African ancestry. His life from beginning to end was personalist, a spiritual search for the center of himself, and through that center for the universally human. Because of his grandfather’s prominence and the racial angle of his own first coming to public notice, race was always part of that search, and he resented it.
For a brief time in the early 1920s Jean Toomer was a writer and a Black American. His spiritual search and the need for employment led him to live briefly in rural Georgia and to write about the experience. Cane, a jumble of prose, poetry, drawings, and a novella disguised in play form, ignited the imaginations of the makers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and two generations later the makers of the Black Revolution of the 1960s. Toomer thought he was drawing from a dying well of Black peasant culture with which he had only the most tenuous personal connection. Readers, by contrast, from Langston Hughes to Alice Walker, found the well Toomer tapped to be deep, rich, and ever self-renewing.21
Within a year of the publication of Cane, Toomer was off on his spiritual quest, leaving behind both the New York intellectual world to which he had briefly aspired and the Black identity he had tried on. He became successively a disciple of the mystic Georges Gurdjieff, an itinerant teacher, a seldom-published philosopher, a Quaker leader, and a recluse. He died in 1967, just before his masterwork was republished and spoke to a new generation of monoracial African Americans. Black critics saw and valued the powerful talent at work in the making of Cane, as well as the celebration of Black peasant life and the horrifying account of White racial oppression. But they tended to see Toomer the man as racially confused. Alice Walker confessed to “feelings of disappointment and loss.”
Disappointment because the man who wrote so piercingly of “Negro” life in Cane chose to live his own life as a white man, while [Langston] Hughes, [Zora Neale] Hurston, Du Bois, and other black writers were celebrating the blackness in themselves as well as in their work. Loss because it appears this choice undermined Toomer’s moral judgment: there were things [White racism] in American life and in his own that he simply refused to see.22
This account suggests that, whatever Toomer’s talent and contribution, he did not know who he really was, a Black man in a racist nation. Indeed, Walker’s assessment might imply self-hatred on Toomer’s part, the internalization of White America’s contempt for Black people. It is clear that Walker thinks Du Bois and the others made a nobler choice when they embraced an unambiguous Black identity.
Fig. 8.4.
Jean Toomer, herald of the Harlem Renaissance, ca. 1934. From the Marjorie Toomer Collection. Copyright Estate of Marjorie Content. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Yet, in addition to the remarkable sensitivity toward the Black folk to be found in Cane, Toomer’s writings show that he saw things differently from the way Walker understood him. He thought he knew who he was—not simply a monoracial Black man, but a man of multiple ancestries and identities in a nation that did not yet recognize multiplicity. Many decades before others took up the theme, Toomer asserted the constructedness of race and proclaimed a vision of a society that went beyond race. He believed he was a universal man—not, as Walker would have it, a Black man who eschewed Blackness for Whiteness, but a man who did not fit in racial boxes, whose very existence challenged monoracial categories and, behind them, the viciousness of racism. Thus, he could write in later years:
I would liberate myself and ourselves from the entire machinery of verbal hypnotism…. I am simply of the human race…. I am of the human nation…. I am of Earth…. I am of sex, with male differentiations…. I eliminate the religions. I am religious…. What then am I?
I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them.
I belong to no one of them and I belong to all.
I am, in a strict racial sense, a member of a new race….
I say to the colored group that, as a human being, I am one of them…. I say to the white group that, as a human being, I am one of them. As a white man, I am not one of them I am an American. As such, I invite them [both], not as [colored or] white people, but as Americans, to participate in whatever creative work I may be able to do.23
Toomer’s was a personal vision, born out of mystical seeking, written into a vague program for humankind. It spoke in no concrete way to the needs of people in America who were marked off by color for domination and abuse. Rather, it was a psychological vision of a person who knew his mixedness and his wholeness, and who believed them to be more important than group strivings. Ultimately, neither White nor Black America in the first half of the twentieth century had room for a racially multiple man like Jean Toomer, at least not for public recognition of his multiplicity. Perhaps now, in a new century, there is room.
WALTER WHITE
Walter White was the Whitest, and the Blackest, of the multiracial people I discuss in this essay. Physically, he was short, blond, and blue-eyed. By history and by choice, he was Black. Like Toomer, White grew up in a nearly White family on the margin between African American and European American social circles, in his case in Atlanta. Unlike Toomer, his family was not wealthy or well connected. His father carried the mail. Both the elder White and his wife were light-skinned enough to pass for White, but either they chose, or circumstances forced them, to remain on the Black side of the racial margin.
In middle age White declared his racial allegiance, with none of the ambivalence of Du Bois or Toomer. Perhaps it was because he did not come from the interstitial class and color position of the mulatto elite, or perhaps it was that by midcentury the one-drop rule imposed by Whites had so taken hold among African-derived people that they could imagine no other. Or maybe it was his own personal history that led Walter White to make such an unequivocal statement of his identity.
I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. Not long ago I stood one morning on a subway platform in Harlem. As the train came in I stepped back for safety. My heel came down upon the toe of the man behind me. I turned to apologize to him. He was a Negro, and his face as he stared at me was hard and full of the piled-up bitterness of a thousand lynchings and a million nights in shacks and tenements and “nigger towns.” “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” he said sullenly. “You white folks are always trampling on colored people.” Just then one of my friends came up and asked how the fight had gone in Washington—there was a filibuster against legislation for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee. The Negro on whose toes I stepped listened, then spoke to me penitently:
“Are you Walter White of the NAACP? I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I thought you were white.”
I am not white. There is nothing within my mind and heart which tempts me to think I am. Yet I realize acutely that the only characteristic which matters to either the white or the colored race—the appearance of whiteness—is mine. There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile, in a black skin. Why then do I insist that I am a Negro, when nothing compels me to do so but myself? …
There is no mistake. I am a Negro. There can be no doubt.24
The dawning of this monoracial, one-drop consciousness came suddenly to young White. In August 1906, when White was thirteen, a race riot struck Atlanta. When the rioters came to the White family’s house, the racial line was forever drawn:
A voice which we recognized as that of the son of the grocer with whom we had traded for many years yelled, “That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives! Let’s burn it down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in!” In the eerie light Father turned his drawn face toward me. In a voice as quiet as though he were asking me to pass him the sugar at the breakfast table, he said, “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!”
In the flickering light the mob swayed, paused, and began to flow toward us. In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance, in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority….
Yet as a boy there in the darkness amid the tightening fright, I knew the inexplicable thing—that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me…. I was gripped by the knowledge of my identity, and in the depths of my soul I was vaguely aware that I was glad of it. I was sick with loathing for the hatred which had flared before me that night and come so close to making me a killer; but I was glad I was not one of those who hated; I was glad I was not one of those made sick and murderous by pride….
It was all just a feeling then, inarticulate and melancholy, yet reassuring in the way that death and sleep are reassuring, and I have clung to it now for nearly half a century.25
The monoracial identification was reinforced when Walter White’s father died in 1931 after being hit by a car. He was taken by the car’s White driver to the city hospital, where he was placed in the White ward. Neighbors who had witnessed the accident told Walter White’s darker-skinned brother-in-law that the elder White was in the hospital. He went looking in the Black ward and did not find him. When he looked in the White ward, the hospital workers realized they were tending a Black-identified man in the wrong ward. Horrified at having sullied their pristine Whiteness, they delivered White senior to the Black ward across the street. There, as Walter White recounted the story, in a dirty, vermin-infested, densely packed facility, his father died.26
Walter White’s vision, then, was purely monoracial. He worked for the NAACP, the premier Black organization, for thirty years, twenty of them as executive director. Yet he had his multiracial moments, too. His masterwork as a novelist, Flight, is a tale of color and passing. This is as close as White came to contemplating the constructedness of racial categories in print. In 1949 White divorced his African American wife of more than twenty years and married a White woman, Poppy Cannon, who was several shades darker than he. There was a great hue and cry in both Black and White circles. In the former, White was accused of having sold out his race for a piece of White flesh, and Cannon, of having seduced one of Black America’s most beloved leaders. Some White segregationists leered that this proved that all Black men wanted was to bed White women.27
Only in the final chapter of his autobiography did Walter White confess to some feelings of racial multiplicity, and then only in the context of a starry-eyed paean to interracial harmony.
Yet I know, I know, I know that there is no reason for this killing, this hatred, this demarcation. There is no difference between the killer and the killed. Black is white and white is black….
I am one of the two in the color of my skin; I am the other in my spirit and my heart. It is only a love of both which binds the two together in me, and it is only love for each other which will join them in the common aims of civilization that lie before us….
I am white and I am black, and know that there is no difference. Each casts a shadow, and all shadows are dark.28
Granted that Walter White adopted a formal monoracial identity, the degree to which observers have credited monoracial Blackness to him is still remarkable. The cover of the reprint of his autobiography, A Man Called White, bills it as “the life story of a man who crossed the color line to fight for civil rights.” By that the publishers mean, it turns out, not that a phenotypically White man crossed the color line to identify himself as Black and fight racism for decades but rather that on one brief occasion in 1918 the Black man Walter White posed as a White man in order to investigate a racist group. Surely, vital though that was as a political moment, it was the less significant color line crossing in White’s personal life.
In choosing a monoracial Black identity, Walter White was making a personal response to a political situation, making his personal racial decision conform to his politics. He did not sustain this monoracialism throughout all aspects of his life. Nonetheless, a monoracial, essentialist Blackness is the main theme that more recent commenters have attributed to the life and work of Walter White, as of Du Bois.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
W. E. B. Du Bois was the archetypal African American whose actual embrace of racial multiplicity and ambiguity has not generally been recognized. Walter White chose to eschew phenotype and embrace monoracial Blackness. Jean Toomer was the sole individual among those examined here who allowed himself a sustained encounter with the fact of his mixedness. White and Du Bois worked politically, publicly, in a monoracial space. But all three lived in a racial space that had great fluidity, ambiguity, and mixedness. In a later age, when other people, operating from an uninterrogated monoracial framework, came to write the histories of Du Bois, White, and the others, they saw only the public positioning and not the personal lives.
Gregory Stephens points to Frederick Douglass as an emblem of the ambiguity these people’s life choices present. Although Douglass, unlike White, Toomer, and perhaps Du Bois, probably could not have passed for White, he possessed multiracial ancestry and inhabited a multiracial social space. Indeed, even as he was the nineteenth century’s most ardent and honored agitator for the rights of Black Americans in slavery and freedom, he worked and socialized with White people, married a White woman, and pointed toward a hoped-for future of the sort that Nelson Mandela would one day call a nonracial democracy. Stephens characterizes Douglass’s racial stance thus:
In 1886, he told an audience: “[A man painting me insisted I show] my full face, for that is Ethiopian. Take my side face, said I, for that is Caucasian. But should you try my quarter face you would find it Indian. I don’t know that any race can claim me, but being identified with slaves as I am, I think I know the meaning of the inquiry.” Douglass’ public persona was that of a defender of the rights of Afro-Americans. But his private identity was multiethnic…. He believed that his multiethnic identity and community were not abnormal, but rather represented the future of America.29
Stephens presents Douglass as a meta-mulatto, a larger-than-life advocate of nonracial democracy and an end to racial thinking. In that characterization Stephens goes too far.30 Whatever measure of multiplicity Douglass—or Du Bois, White, or even Toomer—may have experienced in his private life, his embrace of a complex identity did little to undermine the social power of what G. Reginald Daniel calls the Law of the Excluded Middle.31 Du Bois, White, and others like them embraced political Blackness and confraternity with monoracial African Americans and were tireless advocates of the cause of Black America, monoracially defined.32 From sometime in the late nineteenth century until very late in the twentieth, multiracial people, part of whose ancestry was Black, almost always passed as unmixed African Americans. They constituted an anomaly in the binary racial system, not a challenge to it, and their multiraciality was covered over. Those few people like Jean Toomer who attempted to challenge the binary racial system were rendered irrelevant and invisible. In this period, the monoracial fact overwhelmed the multiracial fact. Such was the power of Blackness.
Fig. 8.5.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Photo by Mathew Brady Studio. Courtesy of Ronald L. Harris.
This essay originally appeared in Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence, which I edited with G. Reginald Daniel (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). An earlier version was presented to the Collegium for African American Research, Münster, Germany, March 20, 1999. Several people there made comments that improved the work. In addition, I am grateful for the patient suggestions of Patrick Miller, Reginald Daniel, Puk Degnegaard, and Lori Pierce. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly has explored this territory more thoroughly in “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862–1935” (unpublished MS) and “Mixed-Race Leadership in African America: The Regalia of Race and National Identity in the US, 1862–1903” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009), and she has taught me a lot.
1. Other prominent members of the beigeoisie in those decades included P. B. S. Pinchback, Reconstruction-era acting governor and senator-elect from Louisiana; Adella Hunt Logan, fighter for women’s suffrage and professor at Tuskegee Institute; Homer Plessy, challenger of Louisiana’s Jim Crow railroad car law; Charles W. Chesnutt, the first major novelist in the African American literary pantheon; John Hope, president of Atlanta University; Archibald Grimké, political rival of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; Mary Church Terrell, first president of the National Association of Colored Women; Mordecai Johnson, first African American president of Howard University; Charles Drew, surgeon and pioneer in blood plasma research and blood banking; and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., member of Congress from Harlem.
2. See G. Reginald Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), 91–107. On multiracial people passing for White, see Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” Transition, no. 58 (1992): 4–32; Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnc Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 329–39; F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Thyra Johnston, 91, Symbol of Racial Distinctions, Dies,” New York Times, November 29, 1995; Countee Cullen, “Two Who Crossed the Line,” in Color (New York: Harper, 1925), 16–17; almost any issue of Ebony from the 1950s; Daniel J. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (New York: Penguin, 2011); Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Bella De Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (New York: Norton, 2007); Heidi Ardizzone and Earl Lewis, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White (New York: Norton, 2002); Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Passing for Black is a phenomenon that has not been critically examined, although it is implied in works such as Martha Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception across the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 2009); Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A Tale of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2007); Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class (New York: Free Press, 1957); Charles S. Johnson, “The Social Significance of Color in Negro Society” (Charles Spurgeon Johnson Papers, Fisk University Archives, Nashville, Box 173, folder 35); Verna M. Keith and Cedric Herring, “Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community,” American Journal of Sociology 97.3 (1991): 760–78. Even unmixed White people sometimes chose to pass for Black; see John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961); Grace Halsell, Soul Sister (New York: Fawcett, 1969).
3. Throughout this essay I shall be speaking of the construction of race in terms of Black and White races. It is essential to note that there have always been more than just African- and European-derived peoples on this continent and that the others are part of the equation of any racial construction, as other chapters in this volume make clear.
4. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 3–43, 136–78; Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 5–59; Spickard, Mixed Blood, 235–52; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 19 (1962): 183–200; Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of Miscegenation of Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History 3 (1918): 335–53; Winthrop D. Jordan, “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States,” ed. Paul Spickard, Journal of Critical Mixed-Race Studies 1 (2013): 98–132; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
5. James Thomas Flexner, The Young Hamilton (Boston, Little Brown, 1978), 8–26. So much of race making and the constraints placed on race choosing depends on context. The possibility of African ancestry in Hamilton’s case was a certainty for Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas, larger-than-life figures in Russian and French letters a generation later. Yet though their ancestry was known, they were not marked by the dominant cultures of Russia and France as Black, and their artistic work did not take shape in ways that reflected a Black consciousness or identity. See T. J. Binyon, Pushkin (New York: Vintage, 2004); Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Crown, 2012).
6. Daniel, “Passers and Pluralists”; Davis, Who Is Black?, 31–42; Williamson, New People, 5–59; Sybil Kein, ed., Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Virginia R. Domínquez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Sister Frances Jerome Woods, Marginality and Identity: A Colored Creole Family through Ten Generations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972); Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
7. Williamson, New People, 61, 3, 109.
8. David Forcacs, ed., An Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 189–21, 422–24; Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 116–17.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Advance Guard of the Race,” Booklovers Magazine 2 (July 1903): 3; Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
10. Contrast the interpretations of Du Bois, “Advance Guard”; Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969; orig. 1918), 183–215 passim. I write here about leaders simply because they left writings that give us some clues to their thoughts on these issues. Lives of everyday people of multiracial ancestry and various identifications can be examined in Domínguez, White by Definition; Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Kent Anderson Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Victoria E. Bynum, “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History 64.2 (1998): 247–76; Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
11. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984; orig. 1940), 18–19, 115.
12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Fawcett, 1961; orig. 1903), 16.
13. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 25–49, 115.
14. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Holt, 1993), 72–73.
15. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 16–17.
16. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 11–12, 104–13.
17. Ibid., 97–133.
18. Ibid., 116–17.
19. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), photo following 206; Lewis, Biography of a Race, cover and photo following 304. The book’s darkness may well be the work of someone in marketing at Holt and not reflect Lewis’s reading of Du Bois’s racial identity. When the first version of this essay was being considered for publication, one of the reviewers asked Professor Lewis if in fact the cover picture had been darkened. According to the reviewer’s report, Lewis denied that it had been tinted darker. I have seen the original portrait by Addison N. Scurlock in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, and it is much lighter than the cover of Lewis’s book. The second volume of Lewis’s biography has a much lighter—and truer to life—image of Du Bois on its cover; see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century. Lewis is one of the most distinguished historians of African America. I do not wish to impute any particular motives to him, nor to impugn his scholarship. I am just pointing out a trend in images.
20. Toomer biographies include Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Charles R. Larson, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Charles Scruggs and Lee Vandemarr, Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Jon Woodson, To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999); H. William Rice, “Searching for Jean Toomer,” American Legacy 3.3 (Fall 1997): 16–22. On Pinchback, see Dineen-Wimberly, “By the Least Bit of Blood.”
After this essay was first published, I received a nice letter from Toomer’s stepdaughters, his literary heirs, who gave permission for the photo that appears in this essay. They thanked me for the copy of the book I had sent and said that they were grateful I had interpreted Toomer’s identity and personality correctly.
21. Jean Toomer, Cane, introd. Darwin T. Turner (New York: Liveright, 1975; orig. 1923).
22. Alice Walker, “The Divided Life of Jean Toomer,” New York Times, July 13, 1980, reprinted in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). It is worth noting that Langston Hughes owned his multiplicity even as he chose a mainly Black identity; see Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), esp. 50–51. It is important to understand that Toomer was emphatically not attacking African Americans after the fashion of the racially mixed Negrophobe William Hannibal Thomas. John David Smith, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and the American Negro (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
23. Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 341–42.
24. Walter White, A Man Called White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995; orig. 1948), 3–4; Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,” Negro Digest (February 1948), 12–19.
25. White, A Man Called White, 11–12.
26. Ibid., 134–38.
27. Poppy Cannon, A Gentle Knight: My Husband, Walter White (New York: Rinehart, 1952); Poppy Cannon, “How We Made Our Mixed Marriage Work,” Ebony (June 1952): 24–40; Poppy Cannon, “How We Erased Two Color Lines,” Ebony (July 1952): 47–59; Poppy Cannon, “Love That Never Died,” Ebony (January 1957): 17–20.
28. White, A Man Called White, 366.
29. Gregory Stephens, “Douglass, Not Lincoln, Bolsters GOP,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2000, M2–M3; original brackets. See also Maria I. Diedrich, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Fredrick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).
30. Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). G. Reginald Daniel explores the concept of the meta-mulatto in Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
31. G. Reginald Daniel, “Either Black or White: Race, Modernity, and the Law of the Excluded Middle,” in Spickard and Daniel, Racial Thinking in the United States, 21–59.
32. For other leaders who blended multiracial social lives with monoracial political lives, see Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Adam by Adam (New York: Dial, 1971); Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 10–12, 18, 78ff., 87, 104, 252, 265, 323–25; Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1966; orig. Washington, DC: Ransdell, 1940).
