Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

5. Classing the Color Line: Class-Passing, Antiracism, and Charles W. Chesnutt

132 5 classing the color line Class-Passing, Antiracism, and Charles W. Chesnutt What we can justly ask of white Americans is not only that they cease to practice social discrimination against colored people, but that they begin to practice social discrimination among colored people—they do so already to a limited extent—that they give to colored people an opportunity to demonstrate their social value, and then recognize it as it appears. —Charles W. Chesnutt, “Social Discrimination,” 1916 In a key passage of the address “Social Discrimination,” Charles W. Chesnutt makes a minute syntactical change that registers a critical shift in how Americans could conceptualize discrimination. Exchanging the preposition “against” for “among,” he recommends that rather than treating “colored people” as a racial whole, white observers should differentiate among them to discern their individual worth (424). Delivering his speech to black and white activists at the Amenia Conference, a foundational meeting sponsored by the burgeoning National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Chesnutt clarifies that he objects to any form of prejudice that denies political rights to all African Americans. Beyond issues of politics, however, he suggests that Americans could practice “social discrimination” with “a narrower meaning, that is, to apply to the more intimate, personal association of human beings which we refer to as social intercourse” (424). In defending black Americans’ civil liberties, Chesnutt does not resort to the familiar premise that segregation should be dismantled because blacks are “created equal” to whites and should be guaranteed rights under the law. Rather, he contends that what is so disruptive about Jim Crow policies is that they impede cross-racial relationships, the kind of “inspiring friendships , the mental and spiritual stimulus which comes from meeting . . . classing the color line 133 others of kindred standards of thought and feeling” (424). When African Americans are no longer excluded from whites-only public accommodations and private gatherings, Chesnutt suggests, whites will find that their black compeers who “prove themselves, because of their intellect, character, talent or social charm” are “not only tolerable but desirable socially” (424, 425). In order to offset race-based discrimination, Chesnutt assents to class distinctions as a preferable mode of social division. By emphasizing commonalities between black and white Americans with “kindred standards of thought and feeling,” he highlights what contemporary scholars might call class by another name. As editors Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald surmise in the collection Literature, Class, and Culture, “To say it another way, class involves not just what you ‘have’ or even what you ‘are,’ but what Raymond Williams calls ‘a structure of feeling’: how you look at the world, what you see there, how you experience what you perceive—and how all of that differs from what other groups of people look at, see, and experience” (introduction, 3). That Chesnutt gestures toward this understanding without using the term “class” outright typifies how African American writers often defer or mediate possibly fraught discussions of class, as well as offer indefinite explanations of the concept . According to Chesnutt, social discrimination is “the most difficult and delicate subject on the program” for the Amenia Conference, and accordingly, he takes extra care when associating discrimination with class inequality, filtering his meaning through seemingly neutral terms like “feelings” and “thoughts.” Nonetheless, behind Chesnutt’s cool, rational rhetoric is class anxiety : more specifically, the fear of misclassification, a defensive concern over being categorized among an unfavored class. He resents that individual blacks who possess the means to live “perhaps as well . . . or better ” than their white neighbors must remain indiscriminately grouped among black Americans more generally (“Social Discrimination,” 425). If, as Sian Ngai proposes, anxiety expressed in American literature signals “situations marked by blocked or thwarted action” (Ugly Feelings, 27), then Chesnutt’s works expose African Americans’ thwarted attempts to attain civil equality via the class achievement of black individualism and collective uplift. His works anxiously fixate on the important, yet limited purchase of black middle-class status in the face of Jim Crow segregation. Contemporary scholars have remained uneasy with Chesnutt’s so- 134 dividing lines cial theories and fictional representations that seem to challenge racial disparity while reinforcing other inequalities, such as class. Like several other postbellum black writers and thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, Chesnutt maintains what early U.S. sociologists have called a “functionalist theory of stratification” that assumes that social divisions inevitably...