Monday, February 13, 2012
Books The Father of Modern Black American Literature Is White
Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:12 AM
To study 20th century black American literature is to be told that Cane is the first work in a movement of novels that ends somewhere around Toni Morrison. I accepted this line of thinking until I saw this...
2
For a long time anyone whose origins were south of Milan, Italy was probably considered black in this country.
3
Uh, no. "Black" and "white" had little to do with skin color after several generations of slave owners raping their slave women and producing fairer and fairer-skinned slaves: who were legally black despite their seeming whitness. Blackness or whiteness descended through the mother (pre-DNA testing, it was always Mama's Baby, Daddy's Maybe), hence the taboo against black men being with white women. Such pairings would create visually black white people, and then they whole mythology of white supremacy = skin color would tumble. But you could have very fair skinned black people, identified by their hair, their noses, their lips, the moons in the cuticles of their fingernails. Such folks could pass as white if they chose to, and moved far away where no one knew they were "really" black. See Pudd'nhead Wilson, where one character is described as black "by a fiction of law and custom" not due to anything but the slave status of his mother.
6
Wow, Charles, you are obviously not aware of the laws in the US at the time. Even 1/64 African blood was enough to be legally "black", no matter the skin tone or hair type and color. Then, as now, lighter was considered superior by blacks, here and in Africa, I believe.
8
I think I read that his maternal and paternal grandfathers are white, and then his mom is 1/4 black and 3/4 white. So he is very mixed. Didn't he pass for both races in his day?
12
@1, @9, your whomp and double-whomp this morning have cheered me up so much on this Monday! Thank you.
14
"'O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,' say the Negroes. 'Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,' say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it." - Langston Hughes
16
It's possible Charles is playing with the idea of the arbitrariness of race and the ridiculousness of the one-drop rule. If we go by skin tone, then perhaps Toomer should be white. If we go by blood quantum and we don't accept mixed race as a category, then someone who's more than 50% white should be white, except that the one-drop rule makes him or her black.
Hasn't Colbert played with this idea? I think he said back in 2008, "We know that a black person will vote for a white person, and we know that a white person will vote for a white person, and we know that a black person will vote for a black person, but we don't know if a white person will vote for a black person, so why doesn't Obama just call himself white?"
Hasn't Colbert played with this idea? I think he said back in 2008, "We know that a black person will vote for a white person, and we know that a white person will vote for a white person, and we know that a black person will vote for a black person, but we don't know if a white person will vote for a black person, so why doesn't Obama just call himself white?"
17
Charles Waddell Chesnutt, another biracial American writer, could have passed for white if he had chosen to do so. He wrote several stories that dealt precisely with the prejudice some mixed-race individuals had for African-Americans with darker complexions.
See pictures of Chesnutt here: http://www.google.com/search?q=charles+w…
And read his story, "The Wife of His Youth," here: http://www.accuracyproject.org/t-Chesnut…
See pictures of Chesnutt here: http://www.google.com/search?q=charles+w…
And read his story, "The Wife of His Youth," here: http://www.accuracyproject.org/t-Chesnut…
19
I wouldn't put too much stock in the DNA test that found Watson to be 1/6 African; if you read the article, you'll find that the test is seemingly so flawed that it also shows him to be a woman.....
20
Good Afternoon Charles,
Wow, I can honestly say that I've never heard of Jean Toomer as the Father of Modern Black American Literature. I would have thought Countee Cullen, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar or Richard Wright (a personal favorite) or even Langston Hughes would be considered.
I should check Toomer out.
As far as appearances Toomer's picture reminded me of a photo of Walter White who could have passed for white:
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=walter+wh… ://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Multimedia.jsp%3Fid%3Dm-5972&docid=Wb6E_MWfyKXReM&imgurl=http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/media_content/m-5972.jpg&w=200&h=300&ei=s4E5T-DtG6mGiQLut9iLBg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=257&vpy=168&dur=4370&hovh=240&hovw=160&tx=93&ty=138&sig=114192451170041396274&page=1&tbnh=150&tbnw=104&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0
White was head of the NAACP.
Wow, I can honestly say that I've never heard of Jean Toomer as the Father of Modern Black American Literature. I would have thought Countee Cullen, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar or Richard Wright (a personal favorite) or even Langston Hughes would be considered.
I should check Toomer out.
As far as appearances Toomer's picture reminded me of a photo of Walter White who could have passed for white:
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=walter+wh… ://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Multimedia.jsp%3Fid%3Dm-5972&docid=Wb6E_MWfyKXReM&imgurl=http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/media_content/m-5972.jpg&w=200&h=300&ei=s4E5T-DtG6mGiQLut9iLBg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=257&vpy=168&dur=4370&hovh=240&hovw=160&tx=93&ty=138&sig=114192451170041396274&page=1&tbnh=150&tbnw=104&start=0&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0
White was head of the NAACP.
21
@ 19: What if the figure was 1/12th or 1/24th or 1/48th? It wouldn't change the fact that in had it been known in America, during his formative years, he would have been forced to live a very different life than the one he was allowed to live, based on an arbitrary and meaningless traits.
Comments (21) RSS