Proposal for SCMLA – Dallas, 2005: AMERICAN LITERATURE I
As the Union Army moves southward at the beginning of Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the ex-slave Robert Johnson observes “two things” about the Northerners: they “hate slavery and hate niggers.”[1] So while Northern troops bring emancipation, Southern slaves remain ambivalent about casting their lot with the North. Clearly, freedom is worth most any alignment, but slaves are entirely aware that freedom doesn’t necessarily entail equality. Or put another way, the abolition of slavery would do little to eradicate racism. This reality occasions Iola Leroy, which addresses segregation and discrimination by proxy: pondering racial uplift on the cusp of emancipation is a way of highlighting the absence of racial progress 30 years after the setting of the book. Within a decade (one marked by the emergence of Jim Crow laws), Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition would tackle the same issue in a contemporary setting. The problem with solutions offered in each of these books is that in representing reactions to racism, they contribute to the very logic of racism itself. Using Kwame Anthony Appiah’s analysis,[2] we could say these reactions were antitheses of white racialism and, thus, necessary steps toward overcoming racism. But insofar as they were racialist themselves, they stopped short of completing the dialectical process, and hence, they failed to enable the kind of progress their advocates envisioned.
And yet, each novel – in the very issue it suppresses – reveals the key to completing the dialectic. Harper’s “Friends in Council,” those intellectuals who gather to deliberate over how to enact racial uplift, are all middle class. We know this because none of them speaks in dialect, the marker in this novel of both class and education. Chesnutt’s critique of racism also privileges the middle class: when Dr. William Miller is joined by “a party of farm laborers” on a train headed south from Philadelphia, he thinks, “apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy, these people were just as offensive to him as to the whites in the other end of the train.” He can accept “a classification of passengers” if made “upon some more logical…basis” than an “arbitrary…color line.”[3] In fact, neither racial nor class division is arbitrary; both are effects of the same problem: an ideology that serves ruling class interests.
My paper offers a reading of the ways that race in these novels serves to conceal the operation of this ideology, such that opposing racism becomes a way not to solve the very real problems caused by racism, but rather to miss seeing the underlying cause, thereby reinstating the problem by helping to conceal the problem. If racism is an effect of the same ideology that causes class, then only by attending to both symptoms can the underlying cause be exposed and eradicated. Such is Paul Gilroy’s emphasis in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line,[4] and such is the significance of these novels’ working-class, dialect-speaking martyrs (and, I argue, heroes) Tom Anderson (Iola Leroy) and Josh Green (The Marrow of Tradition).
[1] Frances Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, New York: Oxford UP, 1988: 49.
[2] “Illusions of Race,” In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York: Oxford UP, 1993: 28-46.
[3] Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, Ed. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002: 82.
[4] Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001.
