The Conversation

Multiracialism, as the movement, academic field, and media discourse has come to be known, is a politics that is both controversial and particularly apropos to our contemporary moment in which terms like “post-racial” are frequently used in public discourse in reference to the era of President Obama and to the cultural climate in general.  Multiracialism should not be confused with multiculturalism. Where multiculturalism generally promotes the acceptance of divergent people and cultures for the sake of diversity, multiracialism maintains a decidedly conservative agenda of colorblind ideology that strives to blur the color line at the expense of racialized (particularly black) politics, culture, and identity. (I say particularly black because, as critics have long argued, blackness is one of the most, if not the most explicitly, racialized identities in the United States).  The driving force behind multiracialism is not a celebration of racial and ethnic diversity, but rather a disappearing of this diversity and a supposed de-emphasis of race.  Despite its idealized intentions, what multiracialism tends to achieve is a re-emphasis of rigid racial classifications by subsequently “othering” those who cannot “transcend” race.  The politics of multiracialism can only apply to the people who are privileged enough to be seen as, or who see themselves as, "race neutral" or crossover figures, or as racially ambiguous.  It does little to affect the lived realities of those whom society still continues to stereotype and demonize on a daily basis as a result of their explicit racialization, or identifiable racial identity. Furthermore it disregards and de-legitimizes people who choose to identify with, and take pride in their race or ethnicity, whatever that means to them.           

Conceptions of a multiracial politics, a “mestizo” (“mixed”) America (as it is called in such politics), or a post-racial, “colorblind” culture is not an idea endemic to the late 20th century, although cultural critics, like Jared Sexton, have recently suggested it to be so.  In his new book Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Sexton locates his argument concerning multiracialism within the last thirty years, referring to it as a “decidedly post-civil rights era phenomenon,” (p. 1, italics author’s own).  This is partly because Sexton bases his argument on the careful consideration of the rhetoric of contemporary multiracialists, such as Charles Byrd, the founding editor of Interracial Voice, and writers Randall Kennedy, Gregory Stephens, and Stephen Talty to name a few.  While it is true that multiracialism as a politics has benefited greatly from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in that a space was created for this kind of cultural discourse, the anxieties inherent to it are much older, and can readily be traced to some of the literature produced during an inchoate period in the history of the United States­­—the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. This literature, in which themes of multiracialism, “miscegenation” (i.e. an antiquated and offensive term for interracial reproduction), and calls for a homogenous national identity are explicit, reveals nothing if not the socio-political debates and struggles for subjectivity that continue to obsess our culture today. 

One of the most understudied and provocative American authors of the era, Charles W. Chesnutt, was publishing essays and fiction from 1881 to 1931.  This was a time in which the country was struggling to articulate its burgeoning identity in everything from politics and imperialism to concepts of sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.  The Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years in particular seemed to be consumed with an existential crisis as to what the nation was and who its citizens were, and a palpable fear that the unification of the country could once again disintegrate without rigid social and political classifications.  Chesnutt’s work in particular provides an excellent example with which to think about the developing ideas of race, subjectivity, community, and nationality, because his work, perhaps more so than any other author’s work at the time, is rather strange, controversial, and challenging.             

Chesnutt was a man of mixed race and white enough to “pass,” but he chose to identify himself as black and affiliate himself with the problem of race prejudice.  While Chesnutt was a “civil rights activist, literary artist, student of social history, educator, business man, and cultural savant,” (Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches. p. xxxvi), he was also a multiracialist, and his politics were not always, if at all, articulated in the best interest of the advancement of the black community for the sake of itself.  Most notably, several of his essays do not shy away from advocating total racial amalgamation as the solution to the “Negro Problem,”—he argues for “miscegenation” to be enacted to the point of racial obliteration, an idea echoed by contemporary multiracialists.  While Chesnutt advocated these ideas blatantly in several of his speeches and essays, he had a difficult time constructing a cohesive rhetoric, demonstrated by his struggles to rationalize his politics within his fiction.  In other words, while his explicit amalgamation essays boldly take one tone, his fiction is much more ambiguous as he experimented with different “solutions” to race antagonism.  His curious literature combined with the historical moment at which he was publishing, make for rich material with which to think about both Chesnutt’s particular authorial anxieties and the tensions inherent in these issues as they relate to our current politics.

Part of what makes Chesnutt’s work so important is that while he is not the first black author to write a “passing” narrative, or to integrate discourses of “amalgamation” into his fiction, he does seem to be the first black writer to publish work advocating multiracialism as the solution to antiblack racism, as opposed to the “tragedy” it was more often portrayed as. Considering Sexton’s argument that multiracialism is an extreme iteration of antiblack racism that strives to devalue racialized blackness as a viable identity and culture and serves “as a rationalizing discourse for the continued and increasing social, political, and economic isolation of blacks,” (p. 35, italics author’s own), Chesnutt’s embrace of “amalgamation” as the solution to antiblack racism is clearly one of the most controversial aspects of his work and literary identity.

Chesnutt’s work is full of curious ambivalence and ambiguity regarding both intraracial and interracial race relations, black authorial anxiety regarding responsibilities of racial representation, and an open embrace of a homogenous nationalist identity privileged above a racialized one.  His call for “one people moulded by the same [American] culture,” (“Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Cures.” p. 236, italics my own) seems to hold profound implications for our current cultural climate, (and indeed was echoed by President Bill Clinton during his 1997 “Initiative on Race” speech and, to a less explicit extent in then-candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech).  Perhaps one reason why Chesnutt ceased to publish fiction after 1905 is that his ideas were rather out of place with the racial anxieties and ideologies of his time, which either called for explicit racial solidarity and/or exposed the supposed “race betrayal” and subsequent devastation of “passing,” and therefore his fiction failed to elicit tangible social change.  Or perhaps it was because Chesnutt could not consolidate his generalized politics with the “lived realities” of his characters (who, of course, were meant to represent “types” found in the contemporary Southern culture).

Chesnutt believed he had a “solution,” and proclaimed his ideas publicly, but was perhaps aware, based on his fictional musings, that amalgamation, and/or nationalism eclipsing racialization was difficult, if not totally out of the question for a society embroiled in self-imposed racialized dichotomies and anti-miscegenation laws.  Whether or not he was aware of the arguably racist, classist tenor of amalgamation is debatable, but it is safe to suggest that his philosophies were either wildly ahead of their time, or suggestive of an era longing nostalgically for a nation composed of “simpler” ideologies.  In other words, although Chesnutt and his contemporaries were fighting against a color line that separated white from the nonwhite, by advocating for a multiracial politics of amalgamation Chesnutt was unintentionally helping to restructure a color line separating the black from the non-black, which continues today.

Post-Reconstruction Multiracial Politics

There will undoubtedly be a race problem in the United States, with all its attendant evils, until we cease to regard our colored population as Negroes and consider them simply as citizens—Charles Chesnutt ( “A Plea for the American Negro.” p. 120).

If it is only by becoming white that colored people and their children are to enjoy the rights and dignities of citizenship, they will have every incentive to ‘lighten the breed’…that they may claim the white man’s privileges as soon as possible—Charles Chesnutt (“The Future American: A Complete Race-Amalgamation,” p. 134).

During his limited career as a writer of fiction (1899 to 1905), Charles Chesnutt maintained his lesser-known position as a prolific orator and essayist for fifty years—from 1881 to 1931.  Many of his essays, like his fictions, are largely concerned with the “Negro Problem,” or the question of race and race relations, particularly in the South.  He published about 14 essays before he began publishing his short story collections in 1899, and in several of those early essays dealing with race, there are themes prevalent that later went on to inform his fictions.  Chesnutt felt compelled to continuously repeat his philosophies and his politics in every form of his writing because the changes he wished to see accomplished in society were never realized in his lifetime.  It is remarkable that in his essays, as it is with the progression of his fiction, although the themes remain similar the tone changes, and the political intentions and visions play out very differently. 

His early essays, written before and during 1899, tend to be more optimistic and traditional in their treatment of the “solutions” for race prejudice—this is understandable considering that it was a time “in Chesnutt’s career when the future seemed bright with promise and his confidence in himself and how he would give shape to the years ahead was virtually unbounded,” (“Introduction.” Essays and Speeches. p. xxviii, italics my own).  For example, in his early essays Chesnutt initially advocates for uplift through means of education, wealth, and character development.  In his early essays and fictions Chesnutt was not yet blatantly advocating amalgamation or post-racial identity that we see for the first time in the essay “A Plea for the American Negro,” written in 1900.  Rather, in his early essays Chesnutt was adhering to what critic Candice Jenkins refers to as the “salvific wish,” (Private Lives, Proper Relations. p. 13) of adopted normative white propriety, suggesting that by obtaining the normative white social and cultural means of uplift (as opposed to the racial, or the political—racial uplift being an ideology promoted by black intellectuals like W.E.B. Dubois) black people would become, not only more “white” but, what was infinitely more important to Chesnutt, more American, thereby solidifying the rights to full citizenship in the eyes of the white community.  To clarify, Chesnutt was not advocating broad "white behavior" to blacks, but "normative" white values, i.e. Puritanical modes of comportment attributed to the "better class" of whites (that which is considered "the norm").  Chesnutt thought that if blacks culturally mirrored whites by behaving in ways that were considered normative and "safe," or culturally acceptable by whites (because it was middle and upper middle class whites who were believed to behave in this way) than racism and explicit black racialization would diminish.  Although racial uplift also strove to end racism, it was ideally developed with the intention of creating a positive black identity.  In other words, racial uplift was concerned with black improvement for the sake of the black community as an empowered "black" community, unlike Chesnutt’s embrace of normative white values at the expense of black identity and black community.  This is one of the important ways in which Chesnutt’s politics differ from DuBois and Booker T. Washington, (however racial uplift also became entangled with “passing,” so it was ultimately no less complicated).

To strengthen his call for normative social decorum, Chesnutt quotes from an unidentified Southern Carolina court case in his essays “What is a White Man?” and “The Future American: A Stream of Dark Blood.” The court case reads, “‘The question whether persons are colored or white, where color or feature is doubtful, is for the jury to determine by reputation, by reception into society, and by their exercises of the privilege of a white man, as well as by the admixture of blood,’” (“The Future American: A Stream of Dark Blood,” p. 130).  Chesnutt believed that until the black race adopted these social values it would continue to be “a deterrent to race mixture [because of its] low industrial and social efficiency,” (“The Future American Race: A Stream of Dark Blood,” p. 133).  This statement reveals Chesnutt’s true intentions.  Obtaining and maintaining behaviors conducive to white propriety is only a means to the end, the end being, ultimately, amalgamation. 

The fact that his essays during and after 1900, (and particularly after the mainstream rejection of his second novel The Marrow of Tradition), turn towards explicit calls for amalgamation is revealing because it is representative of Chesnutt’s relative advantageous position as a light-skinned mixed race person.  As one writer put it, “Chesnutt represented an ideal; or, he came as close to embodying the ideal condition for an African American as anyone was likely to at the time,” (Essays and Speeches. p. xxiv).   Embodying this “ideal” allowed Chesnutt to speak from a place of privilege that was not evocative of the experiences of the black community in general.  The fact that Chesnutt even chose to self‑identify as black was considered surprising and admirable, yet curious.  The critic William Dean Howells wrote a laudatory piece on Chesnutt in 1900 in which he pointed out for a national readership that here was an ostensibly white man choosing to identify with the black race, when, seemingly, there was no necessity on his part to expose himself to bigotry, (“Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories,” pp. 699–701).  Chesnutt chose to affiliate himself with the black “race” and the “race problem” because he believed that if the black community were able to lay claim to him as one of “their own,” it would only benefit the community en masse.  Interestingly, this is a very different attitude from that of contemporary multiracialists, who in no way want to affiliate themselves with the black community.  However, before one begins to conceive of Chesnutt as an uncomplicated civil-rights activist, it is important to point out that this choice conflicts with some of his other sentiments, in which he clearly tries to separate the merits of mixed race individuals from the, what he deemed, digressive behaviors of the black community.  To reiterate, “Chesnutt…[was] outraged by the legal, political, and social consequences of the ‘taint’ of ‘black blood,’”  (Essays and Speeches. p. xxx).  It seems safe to argue that he would only want to affiliate himself with his “blackness” so long as the race continued to progress.

Unfortunately, despite his affiliation with the black community and his political agenda, and despite the passing of the “progressive” laws of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Chesnutt was still seeing no legitimate socio-cultural or attitudinal changes being affected towards black people.  Having lived the experience of someone able to successfully transcend the color line, Chesnutt began to lose faith in white society’s eventual acceptance of middle and upper middle class, socially astute, educated black people.  He began to realize that contemporary cultural attitudes truly revolved around the color line, regardless of the attitudes, education, class, deportment, or social graces possessed by the individual, and that he himself was probably accepted more so for his considerably light skin and early relatively tame depictions of black characters than for his intellectual contributions or ideas for moving the race forward. “…Because [Chesnutt] was of mixed racial ancestry, he—like Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois—was also cited in support of a contrary point of view: since this particularly fair-skinned man represented a variant type, he did not provide a true measure of blacks’ capabilities or lack thereof,” (Essays and Speeches. pp. xiii–xiv).  In other words, initially Chesnutt’s literature was accepted, even celebrated, because it provided entertaining, tame depictions of black characters and, in its ambiguity avoided being overtly political.  Both Chesnutt’s subject matter, and the fact that he crossed the color line into the world of white publishing were not deemed a threat, because these actions were not deemed to have emanated from a truly “black” writer.  This knowledge—that color is more heavily weighed than class—is expressed in his later fictions and essays.  Thus, proposing “etiquette,” as he did in a speech to the Normal Literary Society in Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1881, was not, Chesnutt later realized, going to change the lived reality and opportunities of the black community for advancement, not so long as white people continued to hate on the basis of easily identifiable skin color.  Arguably this is why Chesnutt turned to the controversial politics of amalgamation as the only conceivable way to literally get past physical stigma, much like how contemporary multiracialists advocate the same thing and couch their political intentions in similar terms. 

While Chesnutt did not intend to advance ideas that many would argue were antiblack—rather on the contrary, as he considered himself an advocate for the civil rights of the entire black race—as one can see from his work, his allegiance and hopes truly lay with the mixed race segments of the black community.  He desired a homogeneous brotherhood, a mestizo “American race,” in which no individual affiliated himself or herself with explicit racialization, and in which no individual was racially classified, or projected as such, and he resented the effects of antiblack prejudice on the mixed race, or at the very least upper class black community.  “Twenty-five years,” Chesnutt said, “of even the imperfect freedom which people of color have enjoyed in this country must surely have produced some hundred of thousands who are capable of properly appreciating the responsibilities and wisely executing the duties of citizenship. To say that these men must be deprived of their rights because others of their complexion have not reached that point of development is simply outrageous,” (“An Inside View of the Negro Question,” p. 61).  Those who were best able to benefit from this politics, and those who continue to benefit from this politics, and “execute the duties of citizenship” are of course those who were and are able to pass, amalgamate, “transcend” race—light-skinned mixed race people.  It is important to recognize that in the essay “A Plea for the American Negro,” quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Chesnutt is not merely suggesting that race prejudice will dissipate once Americans cease to define people solely by skin color and start conceiving of them as citizens regardless of external signifiers.  Rather, Chesnutt is literally suggesting that race prejudice will continue until there is no external signifier left with which to define individuals as “Negro,” and, perhaps most importantly, by extension implicate mixed race individuals in the wave of antiblack race hatred.  Thus, while Chesnutt’s politics and intentions remained the same throughout his fictions, essays and speeches, his different tones and iterations can perhaps best be understood as a developing pessimism with the status quo, leading into, as a last ditch effort, an unyielding belief in the “redemptive” powers of multi-generational miscegenation.  He seemingly wanted the entire black community to be able to eventually transcend the “taint” of “black blood,” in order to alleviate race prejudice.  Nonetheless, he was, undoubtedly, as one can see in his fictions and his essays, especially concerned with the effects of antiblack racism on the mixed race community, who were already supposedly that much closer to amalgamation and the post-racial ideal.

What Chesnutt and contemporary multiracialists of course fail to recognize is that the realization of multiracialism’s vision, if it comes to pass, will not aid in the construction of a post-racial American identity, but only in the further stratification of segments of the black community.  If the black race were to amalgamate into whiteness, and thus create the “mestizo” America, society would not suddenly cease to interpret and racialize black people as black, because the uniformity of amalgamation would be impossible.  If anything, any form of amalgamation would only further separate the black community on an even more explicit version of the color line—from those who can, in essence “pass” for white, or choose to avoid racialization all together, and those who cannot.  Furthermore, this kind of politics places increased emphasis and anxiety on race; and consequentially, this explicitly racialized dichotomy would continue to be observed both intraracially and objectively, continuing the tradition of race prejudice.  This has of course already been the case; otherwise the politics of contemporary multiracialism and those who oppose it would not exist.

There is no doubt that what Chesnutt advocated was normative white values and proto-multiracial politics.  However during his time he did not, and arguably could not, know any better, in the sense that he was writing and living in a time of burgeoning modern identities.  At the time of his early essays and fictions, black people had only been “free” for one, going on two generations; thus their new cultural roles, opportunities, politics, subjectivities, etc. were in flux and developing in the moment.  Chesnutt’s constantly changing, and at times contestatory visions for transcending racial stigmas are best understood as a man trying to articulate “solutions” with the best of intentions, as they came to him, and he had to do so without the benefit of analyzing a rich and deep history.  One author suggested that Chesnutt’s “writings focusing on race, politics, and social amelioration in fact document…a wide range of experiments in devising a way to motivate both blacks and whites to mold a nation in which all may find equality in gaining access to economic opportunity, in exercising full civil rights, and in experiencing Americaness at its finest,” (“Preface,” Essays and Speeches. p. xv).  Thus Chesnutt’s politics, while informing and forming the basis for contemporary multiracial politics, are relatively redemptive compared to contemporary multiracialists who have the audacity of having observed centuries of antiblack history and still choose to advocate something so arguably degrading, oppressive, and regressive.

However, in Chesnutt’s varied body of literature, although clearly, painfully aware of the tenor of his contemporary moment, he continued to experiment with and advocate for something that he knew was an impossibility in its ability to affect the entire “race” equally for a multitude of reasons.  This is what makes Chesnutt a multiracialist.  As Sexton articulates, just as multiracialists think that they are providing a solution to post-civil rights racial antagonism, they are, in essence, doing nothing but reiterating notions of essentialized race, while disavowing black individual, cultural, and communal legitimacy.  Just as Chesnutt thought he was doing more good for the black community by abandoning the ineffectual politics of fiction in favor of the provocative “solutions” found in his essays, both generations of multiracialists forgot and forget to take into consideration the lived reality of black people in this country and, for the later generation, empirical history, and black politics, scholarship, and theory. 

Chesnutt wrote, “There can manifestly be no such thing as a peaceful and progressive civilization in a nation divided by two warring races, and homogeneity of type, at least in externals, is a necessary condition of harmonious social progress,” (“The Future American: A Complete Race Amalgamation,” p. 135).  As we know, not everyone can “amalgamate,” and not everyone wants to “amalgamate,” assuming the ignorance that there are even “pure” races from which to abandon, and “pure” races for which to blend into in order to construct the “mestizo” ideal.  In fact, it goes without saying that this country, and its citizens, are deeply interracially integrated already, and obviously have been for centuries.  Perhaps this “refusal” to engage in these three-centuries old “amalgamation schemes” is because people believe that one day, America will be open enough to accept all people as its citizens while simultaneously finally coming to terms of acceptance regarding its already multifarious racial, ethnic, classed, gendered, sexed, multitudinous body politic.  For multiracialists to explicitly advocate for a nation that identifies its citizens solely by their American nationality, or identity, at the expense of a racialized identity is naive in that it does not take into account those who do not have the choice, or choose not to be seen as just an "American" and nothing else.  There is no reason why racial, ethnic, and national identities should be mutually exclusive—there is no legitimate reason why race or ethnicity has to be forcefully collapsed or disappeared before we can be considered a cohesive American culture. Our multitudinous body politic can be simultaneously celebrated as uniquely American.  A homogenous identity, whether politically, racially, or any other ideology need not be cultivated before we can call ourselves as such.

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Tags: Charles W. Chesnutt, Kirin Wachter-Grene, multiracialism