Mixed Race Studies

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-06

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University, Washington, D. C.

To the Editor:

Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made in my biography of Toomer, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, published in 1993. Nothing like reinventing the wheel.

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Kimberly A. Barrett, Vice President for Student Affairs
University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama

To the Editor:

Despite the interesting investigative work of its authors, the recent Chronicle article on Jean Toomer was troubling to me because it served as another apparent grain of truth that sustains two deeply entrenched stereotypes. One of these is the myth of the confused mulatto who is disabled by incessant struggles with his or her racial identity. The other is the “one-drop rule“—the idea that anyone with an identifiable black person in his or her lineage is assumed black. I think it’s time we acknowledge the reality of the existence of the well-adjusted multiethnic/biracial white person. As the self-identifying African-American mother of a young man who fit that description while growing up, I’d like to share part of our story in the spirit of balance.

“Your mom is black?” was a frequent refrain and innocent nod to the notion of the one-drop rule when my son’s acquaintances met me for the first time. I must admit that I, too, did not escape the influence of this perennial rule. On those dreamy weekend mornings when my husband and I lay awake pondering who our child would look like, I smugly argued that of course our child would be black because one parent was black. My husband, on the other hand, who is white (of Irish and Danish descent) and a card-carrying member of a Native American tribe, asked with dismay, “Where am I in this equation?”…

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Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

To the Editor:

In their article on Jean Toomer, the authors Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. claim that Toomer suffered from a case of “conflicted racial identity” (“Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” The Chronicle Review, February 11). Toomer, one of the first proponents of thinking about race in multiracial “American” terms, is now said to have been passing as white. The authors justify this assertion by presenting new evidence that Toomer identified himself differently based on location and situation.

It is true that Toomer most likely self-identified as “Negro” when he registered for the draft. It is also true that in Toomer’s era, and the eras in which his ancestors were identified, census takers were allowed to list racial designation as they perceived it. So, whether Toomer is listed as white or black on the census may say little about his own thoughts on racial identity. It may, however, say much about how he was perceived by the person taking the census and/or responding on his behalf. A similar case can be made for the marriage licenses. In the absence of a handwriting expert, eyewitness, or recorded conversation, it is not verifiable that Toomer self-identified as white or whether he was designated as white by the licensor.

Nevertheless, Byrd and Gates maintain that Toomer had to be passing—and therefore engaging in racial deception—because it is not documented that any of his “direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.”

Flying in the face of decades’ worth of scholarship that builds on Toomer’s work, Byrd and Gates ignore Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” In it, Root states that multiracial people may identify differently over time, may identify differently than their parents or siblings, and that doing so is totally acceptable. As my colleague Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University put it, “It feels like Byrd and Gates have made a conflict where, in fact, there isn’t one.”…

Read the entire responses here.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-02-06

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

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

On August 4, 1922, about a year before he published his first book, Cane, Jean Toomer, age 27, wrote to his first love, a black teenager named Mae Wright, confessing his ambivalence about the dogged pursuit by African-Americans of Anglo-American cultural ideals: “We who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters.” That would be one of the last times he admitted his own Negro ancestry, either publicly or privately. Six years later, Georgia O’Keeffe—Toomer’s friend and later lover—wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, describing the way Toomer, then living in Chicago, was identifying himself: “It seems that in Chicago they do not know that he has Negro blood—he seems to claim French extraction.”

When we were working on a new Norton critical edition of Cane, a masterpiece of modernism composed of fiction, poetry, and drama, we confronted the question of Toomer’s race. Literary critics and biographers have long speculated about how he identified himself, but too often they have chosen not to conduct research into public documents about the topic. Was Toomer—a central figure in two faces of American modernism, the New Negro (or Harlem Renaissance) Movement and the Lost Generation—a Negro who, following the publication of Cane, passed for white?

Toomer is known for proclaiming a new, mixed racial identity, which he called “American.” In an era of de jure segregation, such a claim was defiantly transgressive. But he may have been far more conflicted about his identity than his noble attempt to question American received categories of “race” might suggest…

…In the course of the 25 years between his 1917 and 1942 draft registrations, it seems that Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. During his childhood and adolescence in Washington, as a member of the mulatto elite, he lived in both the white and the black worlds. At times he resided in white neighborhoods, but he was educated in all-black schools. Toomer would write that it was his experience in that special world, “midway between the white and Negro worlds,” that led him to develop his novel “racial position” as early as 1914, at the age of 20, when he defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black.”…

…Why is it so important, as we read Cane, to understand Toomer’s conflicts over his racial identity? What light does it shine on scholarship about his work, about African-American literature, and the way our society has dealt with race? The first reason is the simple, or rather complicated, fact that Toomer himself thought it was important. Important? Toomer obsessed over it, endlessly circling back upon it in the comfortable isolation of his upper-middle-class home in Bucks County, Pa...

Read the entire article 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.

Why Biracial Means Black: The History of Race in America Means Most Blacks Are Biracial to Some Degree

The Root
2010-12-14

Lauren Williams, Associate Editor

Checking a census box that says “black” doesn’t mean you’re denying your white ancestry. It’s just how we roll in America.

When Halle Berry scored her milestone Oscar win in 2002, nobody was screaming from the mountaintops that the first biracial woman had won the Academy Award for best actress. It’s not too often that you hear someone calling Barack Obama the country’s first biracial president. And although I know people who are biracial and multiracial who primarily refer to themselves as such, I’ve also heard most of them refer to themselves as black.

My own mother, who is Creole and fair skinned—to the point where some people assume she is white—will tell you that she is black if you ask, although her answer could be a lot more complicated if she wanted it to be. But isn’t it the same for many black people in this country? It’s generally safe to assume that most black Americans are multiracial. As The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., has pointed out, statistics demonstrate that 58.5 percent of black Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry.

That’s why a new study about how biracial Americans of black-and-white ancestry often self-identify as black comes as no surprise. What is surprising is that the researchers refer to this decision as “passing for black.” As if not mentioning your white ancestry when asked to identify yourself is somehow akin to light-skinned blacks of the past having to completely reject—sometimes forever—their heritage and families in order to blend in to white society.

No, it’s not the same, and for a lot of reasons: A biracial person can check “black” on a census form and 10 seconds later start talking fondly and proudly about his or her white mother or father (anyone who’s heard Obama talk about his family knows this). For biracial or multiracial people to call themselves black is not a wholesale denial of their past and family. It’s not a lie. It’s not, heaven forbid, a ploy to get minority-based benefits, as was suggested by researchers behind the study. It is, for better or worse, a by-product of living in a country that is only a few generations removed from Jim Crow and the one-drop rule…

Read the entire article here.

Passing and the Fictions of Identity

Duke University Press
1996
312 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-1755-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1764-7

Edited by

Elaine K. Ginsberg, Professor of English (Retired)
West Virginia University

Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.

These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.

Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.

Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young