Between Absorption and Extinction: Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical Racism

In 1900, Charles Chesnutt predicted and endorsed a "complete race-amalgamation," which, by fusing the American population into a single "type," would eliminate "racial discord" and deliver African Americans from oppression: "There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals" ("Future American" 125).¹ Chesnutt is so anxious to assuage the violence of contemporary "social struggle" (ibid.) that he countenances a zero-sum logic: for African Americans to prosper, indeed to survive at all, they must cease to exist as a distinct social group, vanishing without any "perceptible trace." In his three-part essay, "The Future American," Chesnutt appropriates the popular genre of "racial prognostication" (Fredrickson xii) responding to grim predictions of African American "extinction" (ibid.) by envisioning the kind of survival"—one heralding the end of the "race war" (21–23)—with which this non-fiction fantasy mode is obsessed. Chesnutt's all-or-nothing scenario uncannily mirrors white supremacist arguments, in which black bodies pose a biological, medical threat to white "life."²

According to the theory of "natural" race war, a "biological-type" (Foucault 255) struggle foreordains how the white community must act politically, sanctioning disenfranchisement, intimidation, and even physical violence to eliminate the black threat or contagion. In Chesnutt's counter-biopolitical scenario, social and political relations must also be resolved in the domain of physical life of the "species" or "population" (346–47): black survival must be assured, paradoxically, by the "absorption" (FA 124) over many generations of blackness itself. Extrapolating from contemporary demographic ratios, Chesnutt predicts that the members of the wholly new, composite American "type" would appear and "probably call themselves white" (125). This total, "harmonious fusion" of preexisting "broad types"—"white, black, and Indian" (121, 123)—would avert the catastrophic social strife that Chesnutt had begun to foresee, providing perhaps the only possible remedy for ongoing black disenfranchisement (121). In the final installment of "The Future American," Chesnutt wonders "if it is only by becoming white that colored people and their children are to enjoy the rights and dignities of citizenship . . ." (134). By giving credence to this possibility, Chesnutt departs sharply from what previously has been his fundamental approach to questions of race and politics: the forceful demand that African Americans be permitted to enjoy the rights and immunities of citizenship, which they were guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution.

In an 1882 speech entitled "The Future of the Negro," Chesnutt makes a very different kind of race prediction, anticipating the time when full political and civil rights will no longer be restricted by "race or complexion"—a moment that is within reach, so long as African Americans continue the patient, transformative "work" (legal, pedagogical, and economic) begun after emancipation (29–31). In "The Future American," Chesnutt seems to abandon this vision, conceding the possibility that American citizenship is limited by physiological criteria and deferring political change into a more distant future. Chesnutt here refers to an unspecified, but distant frame of time, separated from the present by at least three generations: if total biological "absorption" represents the only way for blacks to secure citizenship, then there is no hope for the intervening generations, who are but a means to this ultimate end.

While Chesnutt does claim in the later essay to speak for the interests of "the Negro," the status of that figure becomes sufficiently ambiguous as to render his project nearly nonsensical. If "the Negro" is to disappear as a category—whether defined by skin "color," other "traits," or even in historical/experiential terms—then how can Chesnutt's prediction serve these interests? What are we to make of this turn in Chesnutt's thought? Why would he stifle his demand for full recognition of African American citizenship, turning instead to this paradoxical, potentially self-defeating argument about population engineering? Under what historical circumstances does this turn to the biological come to seem viable or attractive? What is the significance, if any, of this strain in Chesnutt's thought for our understanding of...