{"id":37044,"date":"2014-08-12T14:05:28","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T14:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37044"},"modified":"2015-05-06T16:40:46","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T16:40:46","slug":"the-deconstruction-of-blackwhite-binaries-critiques-of-passing-in-charles-waddell-chesnutts-the-wife-of-his-youth-and-other-stories-of-the-color-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37044","title":{"rendered":"The De(con)struction of Black\/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt\u2019s \u201cThe Wife of His Youth\u201d and Other Stories of the Color Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

The De(con)struction of Black\/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt\u2019s \u201cThe Wife of His Youth\u201d and Other Stories of the Color Line<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Callaloo<\/a>
\nVolume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014<\/a>
\npages 676-691
\nDOI: 10.1353\/cal.2014.0106<\/a><\/p>\n

Tanfer Emin Tun\u00e7<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of American Culture and Literature
\nHacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey<\/em><\/p>\n

When asked to elaborate on the \u201cNegro Problem,\u201d or the co-existence of racial inequality and democracy in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a> conveyed that the \u201c\u2019Negro problem\u2019 of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.\u201d Kelly Miller<\/a>, his contemporary and fellow National Association for the Advancement of Colored People<\/a> activist, proposed a radical solution to this American dilemma: the \u201cNegro must get along, get white, or get out\u201d (qtd. in Brown 275). Thus the official word that African Americans received from the NAACP, arguably the most influential civil rights organization of the early-twentieth century, was that the color line, or the divide along racial lines (usually black and white), would dominate the lives of African Americans for the next hundred years. Moreover, only three solutions existed: \u201cget along\u201d (accommodate); \u201cget white\u201d (assimilate); or \u201cget out\u201d (leave the United States), which many individuals, including artists such as Josephine Baker<\/a>, eventually did. Miller\u2019s second solution to the Negro problem\u2014\u201dget white\u201d\u2014caused the greatest controversy within the black intellectual community for obvious reasons. Many activists, including Marcus Garvey<\/a> and his supporters, believed that the future of African Americans lay not in their ability to disappear into the white race, but in their blackness\u2014that is, their ability to resist \u201cmiscegenation<\/a>\u201d and the dominant racial hegemony of the United States.<\/p>\n

The battle that emerged along the color line during the turn of the twentieth century was chronicled in American literature, specifically through the works of writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt<\/a> who devoted his entire career to the \u201cNegro problem\u201d (See Wright and Glass). Born in Cleveland, Ohio<\/a>, in 1858, but raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina<\/a>, Euro-American in appearance but of African American heritage, Chesnutt straddled multiple worlds: North, South, black, and white. Early on in his life, he developed a double consciousness which shaped his career as a fiction writer, essayist, pedagogue, political commentator, lawyer, and legal stenographer at a time when African Americans could not even serve on juries or testify on their own behalf. This double consciousness also influenced his personal life, which he spent in the interstices of the black and white worlds (Ferguson, Introduction 2\u20133). Chesnutt maintained that because of the intractable racism of American society, the solution to the \u201cNegro problem\u201d lay not in one of Miller\u2019s three solutions, but in the hands of middle class, educated, progressive \u201ccolor line\u201d blacks such as himself\u2014individuals who transcended categorization by straddling the racial and cultural divide, especially between urban whites and rural blacks (Ferguson, Introduction 5; Ferguson, \u201cChesnutt\u2019s Genuine Blacks\u201d 113). Moreover, \u201cChesnutt\u2019s recognition of, and emphasis on, these interstices, the in-between-ness of race, disturb[ed] turn-of-the-century race science; they exposed the color line as flexible and mutable, a barrier with real social consequences, but nevertheless a biological fiction\u201d (Toth 77).<\/p>\n

In essays such as \u201cWhat Is a White Man?<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Future American,\u201d Chesnutt describes race as \u201ca modern invention of white people to perpetuate the color line.\u201d He believed that racial fusion or \u201camalgamation<\/a>\u201d would eventually (when racist legal restrictions on interracial marriage were revoked) bring an end to race as a category of identity by creating a mestizo, all-inclusive, \u201cfuture American ethnic type\u201d who defied boundaries: \u201cthere would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals\u201d (qtd. in McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232). Because, as he argued, whiteness was a cultural fiction (\u201cblack and Indian blood\u201d already flowed in the veins of many Southern whites), Chesnutt\u2019s utopic vision of American race relations, and plan for the elimination of prejudice and \u201cracial discord,\u201d hinged not on peoples of color assimilating into the dominant white race, which he believed was already \u201cimpure,\u201d but in the flexibility and adaptability of hybridity (McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232; Fleischmann 466). For Chesnutt, the \u201cfuture American\u201d would be an \u201cadmixture\u201d of races, ethnicities, and consciousnesses.<\/p>\n

Although Chesnutt was proud of his black heritage, he understood why some individuals who lived along the color line perceived…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The De(con)struction of Black\/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt\u2019s \u201cThe Wife of His Youth\u201d and Other Stories of the Color Line Callaloo Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014 pages 676-691 DOI: 10.1353\/cal.2014.0106 Tanfer Emin Tun\u00e7, Professor of American Culture and Literature Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey When asked to elaborate on the \u201cNegro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[4284,333,898,897,17725],"class_list":["post-37044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-callaloo","tag-charles-chesnutt","tag-charles-w-chesnutt","tag-charles-waddell-chesnutt","tag-tanfer-emin-tunc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37044","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=37044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}