{"id":11094,"date":"2010-12-30T17:16:15","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T17:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11094"},"modified":"2015-11-29T18:24:51","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T18:24:51","slug":"scholars-say-chronicler-of-black-life-passed-for-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11094","title":{"rendered":"Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/27\/books\/27cane.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\" target=\"_blank\">New York Times<br \/>\n<\/a>2010-12-26<\/p>\n<p><strong>Felicia R. Lee<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Renown came to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jean_Toomer\" target=\"_blank\">Jean Toomer<\/a> with his 1923 book \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=11088\" target=\"_blank\">Cane<\/a>,\u201d which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer\u2019s 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Harlem_Renaissance\" target=\"_blank\">Harlem Renaissance<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fas.harvard.edu\/~amciv\/faculty\/gates.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a>, the Harvard scholar, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ila.emory.edu\/ila-faculty\/sub-f-byrd.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">Rudolph P. Byrd<\/a>, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of \u201cCane\u201d documents that Toomer was \u201ca Negro who decided to pass for white.\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Toomer\u2019s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd\u2019s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition \u2014 and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive \u2014 but that Toomer never \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passed<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think he never claimed that he was a white man,\u201d Mr. Eldridge said.<strong> \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/strong> Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=11102\" target=\"_blank\">The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness<\/a>\u201d published in 1987 by <em>Louisiana State University Press<\/em>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;Yet this new edition of \u201cCane\u201d 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 \u201cCane\u201d and later did not want his work included in black anthologies&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/27\/books\/27cane.html?pagewanted=all\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u201cCane,\u201d which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer\u2019s confounding efforts to defy being stuck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[4913,4912,4914,948,2935,1996,4903,4902,2327],"class_list":["post-11094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-felicia-lee","tag-felicia-r-lee","tag-felicia-renita-lee","tag-henry-louis-gates","tag-henry-louis-gates-jr","tag-jean-toomer","tag-rudolph-byrd","tag-rudolph-p-byrd","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11094"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44348,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11094\/revisions\/44348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}