Mixed Race Studies

A Critique of Pure Pluralism

Chapter in:
Reconstructing American Literary History
Harvard University Press
1986
386 pages
ISBN-10: 1583484167; ISBN-13: 978-1583484166

Edited by:

Sacvan Bercovitch, Powell M. Cabot Research Professor of American Literature
Harvard University

pages 250-279

Chapter Author:

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grandfathers.
Horace Kallen

Reviewing the new (fifth) edition of James D. Hart’s Oxford Companion to American Literature, Joe Weixlmann praises the editor’s effort to expand the coverage of black authors, yet finds the volume’s treatment of black, ethnic, female, and modern writers ultimately insufficient and wanting. Weixlmann concludes that “the old, venerable Oxford Companion to American Literature, despite its partial facelift, remains in its current incarnation, a product of such staid American and academic values as racism, sexism, traditionalism, and elitism.”

This identification of deplorable omissions with a scholar’s bias is quite common in the current debates. Frequently an opposition is constructed between closeminded narrowness (sexism, racism, elitism) and the alternative of inclusive openness associated with what is often called “cultural pluralism. In his essay “Minority Literature in the Service of Cultural Pluralism,” included in one of the several Modern Language Association readers on American ethnic literature which were published in the last decade, David Dorsey writes:

Only from the diverse literatures can youth feel the meaning of the past … At present diversity is everywhere tolerated in theory, punished in practice, and nowhere justified or justifiable beyond an appeal to solipsism. But America has no choice. Only a genuinely pluralistic society can henceforth prosper here. It must be nurtured in our diverse hearts. And for that we need literature, which is the language of the heart.

In this scholarly drama of diversity and pluralism versus traditionalism and prejudice there is emotion and prophecy just as there are heroes and villains. The editors of another MLA reader, Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature (1983), write:

Ethnic pluralism, once the anathema to those who espoused the melting-pot theory, has become a positive, stimulating force for many in our country . . . Transforming the national metaphors from “melting pot” to “mosaic” is not easy. Indeed, the pieces of that national mosaic have been cemented in place with much congealed blood and sweat. We must all continue to work at making the beauty of our multiethnicity shine through the dullness of racism that threatens to cloud it…

…The dominant assumption among serious scholars who study ethnic literary history seems to be that history can best be written by separating the groups that produced such literature in the United States. The published results of this “mosaic” procedure are the readers and compendiums made up of diverse essays on groups of ethnic writers who may have little in common except so-called ethnic roots while, at the same time, obvious and important literary and cultural connections are obfuscated. As James Dormon wrote in a recent review of such a mosaic collection of essays on ethnic theater, “there is little to tie the various essays together other than the shared theme ‘ethnic American theater history,’ as this topic might be construed by each individual author.” The contours of an ethnic literary history are beginning to emerge which views writers primarily as “members” of various ethnic and gender groups. James T. Farrell may thus be discussed as a pure Irish-American writer, without any hint that he got interested in writing ethnic literature after reading and meeting Abraham Cahan, and that his first stories were set in Polish-America—not to mention his interest in Russian and French writing or in Chicago sociology. Or, conversely, Carl Sandburg may be dismissed from the Scandinavian-American part of the mosaic for being “too American.”

Taken exclusively, what is often called “the ethnic perspective”—which often means, in literary history, the emphasis of a writer’s descent—all but annihilates polyethnic art movements, moments of individual and cultural interaction, and the pervasiveness of cultural syncretism in America. The widespread acceptance of the group-by-group approach has not only led to unhistorical accounts held together by static notions of rather abstractly and homogeneously conceived ethnic groups, but has also weakened the comparative and critical skills of increasingly timid interpreters who sometimes choose to speak with the authority of ethnic insiders rather than that of readers of texts. (Practicing cultural pluralism may easily manifest itself in ethnic relativism.)

Yet, if anything, ethnic literary history ought to increase our understanding of the cultural interplays and contacts among writers of different backgrounds, the ethnic innovations and cultural mergers that took place in America; and the results of the critical readings should not only leave room for, but actively invite, criticism and scrutiny by other readers (“outsiders” or “insiders”) of the texts discussed. This can only be accomplished if the categorization of writers—and literary critics—as “members” of ethnic groups is understood to be a very partial, temporal, and insufficient characterization at best. Could not an openly transethnic procedure that aims for conceptual generalizations and historicity be more daring, profitable, and conceptually illuminating than that of simply adding to the sections on “major writers” chapters on “the popular muse,” “Negro voices,” “the immigrant speaks,” “generations of women,” “mingling of tongues,” and the rest of it?

Is it possible now to rewrite Quinn’s chapter and include Douglass or do we need separate chapters for each ethnic group, to be written by “insiders”? Can we construct a chapter on intellectual life in the early twentieth century in which ideas entertained by Anglo-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, and Afro-American figures can be discussed together, or do we have to separate men and women, immigrants and American-born authors? Is it possible to connect Alain Locke, who ended his introduction to The New Negro (1925) with the hope for “a spiritual Coming of Age” with his college classmate Van Wyck Brooks, or are two heterogeneous ethnic experiences at work in them? These questions apply not only to the synchronic analysis of a period, but also to the construction of diachronic “descent lines.” Do we have to believe in a filiation from Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway, but not to Ralph Ellison (who is supposedly descended from James Weldon Johnson and Richard Wright)? Can Gertrude Stein be discussed with Richard Wright or only with white women expatriate German-Jewish writers? Is there a link from the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to those of Frederick Douglass and Mary Antin, or must we see Douglass exclusively as a version of Olaudah Equiano and a precursor to Malcolm X? Is Zora Neale Hurston only Alice Walker’s foremother? In general, is the question of influence, of who came first, more interesting than the investigation of the constellation in which ideas, styles, themes, and  forms of travel.

In order to pursue such questions I have set myself a double task. I shall review significant criticisms of the shortcomings of the concept of cultural pluralism in the hope that the arguments made by intellectual historians of the past decade may affect thinking about American literature today; and I shall attempt to suggest the complexities of polyethnic interaction among some of the intellectuals who were involved in developing the term “cultural pluralism.” It is ironical that the story of the origins of cultural pluralism I shall tell could not have been told in the “pluralistic mosaic” format of group-by-group accounts of American cultural life: one protagonist would illustrate what the current fashion calls “the Jewish experience,” another “the Black experience,” a third “the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant experience.” But the fact is that it was not any monoethnic “experience” that led to the emergence of the concept of cultural pluralism. It was the protagonists’ troubled interaction with each other. Pluralism had a fairly monistic origin in a university philosophy department in the first decade of this century; yet it is a notion whose very mobility challenges the concept’s central tenet of the permanent power of ethnic boundaries…

Read the entire chapter here.

Call at Rio fashion show for more black models

Agence France-Presse
2012-01-14

Only a handful of black models sashayed down the catwalk at this week’s Rio fashion show, sparking fresh calls for quotas to ensure greater diversity in a country where more than half of the population is of African ancestry.

Some 24 labels displayed their latest designs at the Rio de Janeiro winter 2012 fashion week, that ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and as in previous years the models were overwhelmingly white.

Yet Brazil, home to 190 million people, has the world’s second largest black population after Nigeria.

Organizers refused to address this perennial lack of racial diversity, although in the past they claimed that “there is no racial discrimination” in an industry known for its preference for eurocentric standards of beauty.

For the first time in June 2009, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (SPFW)—Latin America’s premier fashion event—imposed quotas requiring at least 10 percent of the models to be black or indigenous…

…Luana Genot, one of the eight black models out of more 200 employed by the main Rio modeling agency, 40° Models, gave details of the hurdles blacks face.

“They call us only when the the theme of the show is linked to black culture,” said the 23-year-old who is also an advertising student at Rio Catholic University (PUC).

“I am often told: What am I going to do with your hair? And for make-up, I am always the last so as not to dirty the brush with overly dark tones,” she added.

Last June, during Black Consciousness Week, Genot organized a debate on “ethnic diversity in fashion” at PUC.

“We are told that the winter collection is for whites in Europe or that black women’s butts are too big, their hips too wide. I am shocked to see that in Brazil, where more than half of the people are descendants of black slaves, there is so little space for us,” she added.

“Brazil’s population is very mixed and this must be reflected in fashion,” Genot said…

Read the entire article here.

Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

The Journal of Modern African Studies
Volume 30, Number 4 (December, 1992)
pages 669-684
DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00011101

Michael J. C. Echeruo, William Safire Professor in Modern Letters
English Department
Syracuse University

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

Blyden was an outspoken interpreter of colour and race as they related to the identity and meaning of his Africanness. For him, the so-called ‘mulatto question’ (tragic, comic, queer) had been imported into Africanist discourse from the politics and power of European racism. For Blyden, blackness was never a metaphorical construct; it was an essential condition for his Africanness. So outspoken was he in this regard that not only was his political career in Liberia actually destroyed in consequence, but many of his biographers (Hollis R. Lynch remains an exception) have become apologetic on his behalf, as if he was, in some major sense, a rather misguided race jingoist. Indeed, Thomas Livingston has gone so far as to make Blyden a failed ethnocentrist, ‘a professional representative of a stigmatized group, and (quoting another writer) likens him to those leaders who ‘instead of leaning on their crutch… get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent’. His Blyden is, he says, a poor man’s Heinrich Heine: weak in arms…

Purchase the article here.

Mark Twain and Homer Plessy

Representations
Number 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988)
pages 102-128

Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
Johns Hopkins University

The carnivalesque drama of doubling, twinship, and masquerade that constitutes Pudd’nhead Wilson and its freakishly extracted yet intimately conjoined story, “Those Extraordinary Twins,” is likely to remain misread and controversial in estimations of Mark Twain’s literary achievement as long as the work’s virtual mimicry of America’s late-nineteenth-century race crisis is left out of account. Readers have, of course, often found a key to the novel’s interpretation in the notorious “fiction of law and custom” that makes the “white” slave Roxy legally “black” by allowing one-sixteenth of her blood to “outvote” the rest (8-9). Like so many parodic moments in the book, however. Twain’s joke about voting speaks not simply to general anxieties about miscegenation but more particularly to the deliberate campaign to disfranchise blacks and strip them of legal protections that was underway by the early 1890s. Built of the brutal artifice of racial distinctions, both American law and American custom conspired to punish black men and women in the post-Reconstruction years, and Twain’s bitter failed fiction, verging on allegory but trapped in unfinished burlesque, has been thought to participate in the black nadir without artistically transcending it or, conversely, without reaching its broader historical implications.

As Hershel Parker and others have demonstrated in detail, Twain’s chaotic process of composition and his unconcerned interchange of various manuscript versions make it impossible to place much weight on authorial intention narrowly defined. Yet this hardly leads to the conclusion that Twain’s vision had no coherent meaning or that his own comic rationale, contained in the opening of “Those Extraordinary Twins,” reveals nothing of significance about the texts critique of contemporary race theory or Twain’s authorial involvement in that critique. Indeed, one might rather argue that the confusion and seeming flaws in the manuscript and the published text, while largely attributable to his haste to produce a book that would ameliorate his financial problems, are also a measure of the social and psychic turmoil that Twain, not least as a liberal Southerner living and working in the North, felt in the post-Reconstruction years. The key phenomena in late-nineteenth-century race relations have just as much place in determining the text’s range of implication, its meaning, as do such mechanical factors as compositional sequence and manuscript emendations. Preoccupied with relevant but improperly construed issues of aesthetic unity and verisimilitude, critics have typically missed the primary ways in which Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and its attached tale of the Italian Siamese twins involves itself in the…

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Role of Identity Integration On the Relationship Between Perceived Racial Discrimination and Psychological Adjustment of Multiracial People

Society for Social Work and Research
Sixteenth Annual Conference
“Research That Makes A Difference: Advancing Practice and Shaping Public Policy”
2012-01-11 through 2012-01-15
Grand Hyatt Washington, Washington, DC
Saturday, 2012-01-14, 14:30-16:15 EST (Local Time)

Kelly F. Jackson, Assistant Professor of Social Work
Arizona State University, Phoenix

Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Rudy Guevarra, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University, Tempe

Racial discrimination is a pervasive social problem that has a negative impact on the physical and mental health of ethnic minority groups. Yet few researchers have examined this phenomenon within the growing population of multiracial persons, which according to the 2010 census has dramatically increased by 32% since 2000. This is particularly troubling in lieu of new evidence that multiracial persons may be more vulnerable to racial discrimination and other mental and behavioral health risks. This highlights the need for social workers to understand the risks and strengths associated with multiracial identity and navigating multiple racial and ethnic ties within a racialized society.

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between perceived racial discrimination, multiracial identity integration, and psychological adjustment of diverse multiracial persons.

Three hypotheses guided this study: (1) perceived racial discrimination would negatively correlate with psychological adjustment (i.e., lower depression, anxiety, stress, negative affect, and higher positive affect); (2) individuals with high multiracial identity integration (who identify strongly with two or more racial groups) would positively correlate with psychological adjustment; and (3) strong multiracial identity integration would buffer the effect of perceived racial discrimination on psychological adjustment…

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For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color

The New York Times
2012-01-13

Mireya Navarro

Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories—indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs…

…A majority of Latinos identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and that is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.

But she says there is no question that she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”

Some of the latest research, however, shows that many Latinos—like Irish and Italian immigrants before them—drop the Latino label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found that the parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Latino on census forms.

Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Latinos tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. That means that many successful Latinos are no longer present in statistics tracking Latino economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study…

…On the other side of the spectrum are black Latinos, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Latinos who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.

Miriam Jiménez Román, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says that issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Latinos led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Latinos of African descent to “check both: Latino and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Latinos who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population…

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Jean Toomer: Fugitive

American Literature
Volume 47, Number 1 (March, 1975)
page 84-96

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

As a young boy, Jean Toomer attended a dinner party during which someone asked his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, if he indeed had “colored” blood. The light-skinned former lieutenant governor of Louisiana answered enigmatically, “That is what I have claimed.” According to Toomer in his unpublished autobiography, Pinchback never cleared up the matter for his grandson. Toomer insisted that he never knew for sure whether or not he was part Negro.

If Toomer’s racial identity was a puzzle to himself, his attitudes toward himself as Negro have also puzzled his critics. Before the publication of Cane (1923), he seemed to advertise his dark blood. After 1923 he ambiguously referred to himself as “an American, simply an American”; and around 1930 he refused to be included in several Negro anthologies. In the same year he let it be known that he was actually “white,” blaming the confusion on Waldo Frank, who had given the impression in his introduction to Cane that Toomer was a Negro. What mystifies everyone, as Darwin Turner pointed out, is why in the summer of 1923 Toomer rejected “a racial identification which a few months earlier he had accepted as a matter of slight importance.”

Explanations have been offered for Toomer’s apparent apostasy…

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Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 35, Number 2, Anxieties of Identity in American Writing (Summer 1993)
pages 226-250

George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington

The culture which will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one which does equal justice to each, but one which looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.

Knowledge of what cannot be said… signals the rock-bottom shape, the boundaries, of our situation in the world; it is the ethical, in the classical sense of the term.

An undated poem kept in a tin box that no one but the author ever saw in his lifetime bears haunting witness to the great lack of Jean Toomer’s existence:

Above my sleep
Tortured in deprival
Stripped of the warmth of a name
My life breaks madly. . . .
Breaks against world
Like a pale moth breaking
Against sun.

In their biography of the poet, The Lives of Jean Toomer, Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge discuss the relationship of this poem to Toomer’s sense of lacking a permanent and certain name, deriving from the fact that his name had changed during his childhood and that different family members called him by different names. His grandfather, for example (the patriarch with whom he lived to young adulthood and who died, Toomer claimed, the day after he completed the first draft of “Kabnis”), would not acknowledge the name he had been given at birth. “Jean Toomer” itself is a later fabrication of the author…

Author, Yaba Blay, to appear on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon

CNN NewsRoom: Weekend Primetime
2012-01-14, 19:00-20:00 EST

Don Lemon, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

(1)ne Drop author, Yaba Blay, will appear on the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon on Sunday, January 15, 2012 during the 7:00 pm-8:00 pm hour (EST).

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

Harvard University Press
January 1996
560 pages
6-3/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674372627

George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies;  Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington

It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.
 
A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.