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The Chasm Between Racial Optimism and Reality [theatlantic.com]

 

In 1868, the abolitionist and orator Anna E. Dickinson published What Answer?, a novel that explored, in a manner revolutionary for its time, the subject of interracial marriage. The Atlantic assigned its assistant editor, William Dean Howells, to review the book. Howells, who would later become the magazine’s editor in chief, was, in the years following the Civil War, something of a racial optimist. He opened his review by recounting a story told to him by one of The Atlantic’s most important contributors:

Mr. Frederick Douglass said the other day that times were when his color would secure him the advantage of a whole seat in a railroad car, but that since the war he was by no means safe from molestation. He told a good story of a citizen with conquered prejudices, who stirred him up out of his nap on the cars recently, and demanded a place beside him. “I’m a nigger,” said Mr. Douglass, showing his head from beneath the shawl in which it had been wrapped. “I don’t care what you are,” answered the liberal-minded intruder; “I want a seat.”

Howells seems to have derived too much hope from this story. He acknowledged that some whites—in particular “those low-down Democrats who spell negro with two g’s”—would not allow expediency or reality to mitigate their enmity for black people. But he nevertheless argued that “there is a great deal to be hoped from human selfishness, fortunately, and we shall not despair of mankind while we all continue so full of egotistical desires and interested ambitions. Pure cussedness is much rarer than would appear.”

[For more on this story by JEFFREY GOLDBERG, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...eam-deferred/552593/]

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