Black Anxiety about Immigration and Jessie Fauset's "The Sleeper Wakes".

The cover story of the July/August 2006 issue of The Crisis is "Immigration: Should African Americans Be Worried? 5 Black Leaders Weigh In."

The opinions vary. Constance Rice, co-director of a Los Angeles equity organization concerned with low-income residents' welfare, states bluntly: "Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr., would for a moment stand for the fact that you have a group of totally exploitable people in this country who are treated just like the slaves were? Not for a nanosecond" (22). Less clear, then-president of the NAACP, Bruce Gordon, warns African Americans not to fall into the "trap" of anti-immigrant racism yet does not want to label immigration a civil rights issue. He calls it instead a human rights concern (24). But political science professor Ronald Walters takes a definite position. He identifies African American worry as "legitimate" (23). Walters cites high unemployment among black men in U. S. cities, points out that black and Latino workers compete for low-wage jobs, and criticizes immigrant workers for not joining unions and thereby depressing all laborers' wages.

Such division typifies early twenty-first-century African American views on immigration, which are complex. A 2007 Gallup poll of non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Hispanics found that sixty percent of each group disapproved of the government's handling of immigration, though no doubt for different reasons. But when asked if English should be mandatory for immigrants allowed to stay in the U. S., high percentages of whites and blacks said yes (80% and 76%, respectively), in contrast to Hispanics (59%). As Carroll Doherty observes in a summary of research conducted in 2006: "The issue of immigration leaves many Americans deeply conflicted. But the social and economic cross-pressure may be greatest on African-Americans, who express relatively positive opinions of immigrants even as they view them as competitors for scarce job opportunities" (1). Black America splits on whether to seek solidarity with immigrants or perceive them as a threat. (1) One side argues in favor of coalition, stressing shared experiences of oppression and race-based discrimination. (2) The other, as is obvious from titles such as Greg Mathis's "Black People Want Work, Too" or James Clingman's "Hey Ya'll, When is the Match for Black Folks?," voices anti-immigrant sentiment. Many Americans of African descent fear that newcomers are stealing African American jobs and jeopardizing black political advancement.

This anxiety is not new. At the time Jessie Fauset published The Sleeper Wakes in three installments in the Crisis in 1920, worry about the huge numbers of immigrants that had been arriving from southern and eastern Europe since the early 1880s similarly dominated many black Americans' perspectives on the subject. The Sleeper Wakes addresses that anxiety, I argue here, by cautioning African Americans not to get drawn into anti-immigrant racism, the position taken by leaders such as Booker T. Washington, who sided with white nativists out of worry that immigrants posed a threat to black workers. Fauset's novella instead narrativizes an argument similar to that of W. E. B. Du Bois and The Crisis in its first decade, the belief that anti-black racism and anti-immigrant racism come from the same source and work in concert to consolidate and perpetuate white power. Not to recognize that fact, Fauset's text shows, is to remain asleep: an extremely dangerous, because totally vulnerable position for black Americans to occupy. Fauset did not avoid divisive issues in order to offer old-fashioned bourgeois romances, a verdict on her too often reproduced in the scholarship, as recent critics point out. (3) In The Sleeper Wakes she links anti-black and anti-immigrant racism to expose their systemic interconnectedness. In doing so, she implicitly but nevertheless clearly critiques Washingtonian accommodationist economic claims, especially for working-class African American women.

As a conventional passing narrative, The Sleeper Wakes centers on the story of Amy Boldin, a very light-skinned young black woman who learns she cannot construct a safe "white" life in a racist nation fundamentally and violently committed to her subjugation, even annihilation. One sign of that racist system's enormous power appears in white people's casual anti-immigrant racism, as seen in the text's two major white characters, Zora Harrison and Smart Wynne. When Amy and her white friend Zora walk around New York City, we learn that "the children, the people all foreign, all dirty, often very artistic, always immensely human, disgusted Zora.... She almost hated them for being what they were. 'Br-r-r, dirty little brats!' she would say to Amy. 'Don't let them touch me' " (583). (4) Similarly, Wynne, the rich white man Amy imprudently marries, embraces nativism. He "was intolerant of all people of inferior birth or standing and looked with contempt on foreigners, except the French and English. All the rest were variously 'guineys,' 'niggers,' and 'wops,' and all of them he genuinely despised and hated, and talked of them with the huge intolerant carelessness characteristic of occidental civilization" (587). My point will be this: Had Amy taken more seriously the anti-immigrant racism of Zora, who introduces her to this suave but completely normative and utterly vicious white racist had Amy been more awake, in other words, to the full meaning of anti-immigrant racism's total collusion with anti-black racism, indeed its descent from anti-black racism--she might never have entered the disastrous marriage which ends with her physically thrown to the floor and Wynne standing over her shouting: " 'Nigger ... nigger, nigger,' and again, 'nigger' " (602). (5)

When Fauset published The Sleeper Wakes in The Crisis in 1920, tensions between African Americans and recent immigrants from Europe ran high. (6) As early as 1853 Frederick Douglass had complained: "Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place" (qtd. in Henri 145); and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century black resentment had escalated. Between 1880 and 1915 more than twenty million people came to the United States from Europe, primarily from eastern and southern regions, most of them Catholic or Jewish, almost all of them non-English-speaking, and all of them poor and eager for any work they could get. Although racialized as nonwhite or not-quite-white by dominant U. S. race ideology, these newcomers nevertheless typically received better treatment in housing (terrible as it was) and jobs (also terrible) than African Americans. (7) That is, black people had good reason to resent and even hate the recent immigrants from Europe. African Americans whose ancestors had been brought to the New World against their will, enslaved, brutalized, raped, and worked to death in order to build the nation now often found themselves crowded out of jobs and housing by people with no claim on the nation, literal or symbolic, even close to that of blacks.

Traditionally black occupations were disappearing with

    the increasing presence of white immigrants in what had been thought
of
   as "Negro jobs." Italians, Sicilians, Greeks, and other
"new" immigrants
   by 1910 were replacing black barbers, bootblacks, and draymen;
western
   Europeans, especially French and German, were taking traditionally
black
   jobs as cooks and waiters; Swedes and Germans were filling up the
   better-grade janitorial jobs, especially in office buildings.
Undoubtedly
   these usurpations by foreigners of "strange tongue and
habits" irked
   black workers and created friction. (Henri 150) 

African Americans especially lost jobs previously available to them in the North, where employers "could draw on a huge pool of immigrant labor flowing into the cities. In 1870 almost thirty-two percent of all black males in Cleveland were employed in skilled trades, but by 1910 only eleven percent were so employed. In New York, black workers were steadily forced out of employment during the same period" (Fuchs 295).

Exacerbating black anger, labor unions excluded them but opened their ranks to most immigrants. Consequently black laborers were brought in to break strikes, which they usually willingly did. They had no allegiance to the unions, which had closed them out, and they needed work. The result, however, was that the racism of union members, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, only increased, and the impact on race relations was deep. Each side hated the other and blamed it rather than the white capitalists in charge for its misery. But the immigrants and their descendants came out on top, as blacks well knew. They could join the unions. Black people, by contrast, faced two tiers of oppression: capitalists and unions.

African Americans also had to compete with immigrants for cheap urban housing, with immigrants winning there too. In New York City, Irish immigrants pushed African Americans north into Greenwich Village, called "Old Africa," in the middle of the nineteenth century; and by 1890 Italians took over the Village, forcing blacks further north. At the turn of the century in the area between Twentieth and Sixty-fourth streets, "blacks and Irish fought bitter battles for control"; in Harlem a few years later, "white policemen patrolled in threes, [as] blacks and Irish fought pitched battles for the turf of 134th Street" (Henri 88). This pattern of dislocation repeated itself in city after city in the North, where African Americans also found themselves subjected to higher rents than immigrants. In Chicago, for instance, as an article in The Survey in 1913 explains:

    A careful house-to-house canvass showed that in the most run down
colored
   neighborhoods in the city, the rent for an ordinary four-room
apartment
   was much higher than in any other section of the city. In crowded
   immigrant neighborhoods in different parts of the city, the median
rental
   for the prevailing four-room apartment was between $8 and $8.50; in
South
   Chicago near the steel mills it was between $9 and $9.50; and in the
   Jewish quarter, between $10 and $10.50 was charged. But in the great
   black belt of the South Side the sum exacted was between $12 and
$12.50.
   That is, while half of the people in the Bohemian, Polish, and
Lithuanian
   districts were paying less than $8.50 for their four-room apartments;
the
   steel-mill employees less than $9.50, and the Jews in the Ghetto less
   than $10.50, the Negro, in the midst of extreme dilapidation and
crowded
   into the territory adjoining the segregated vice district, pays from
$12
   to $12.50. This is from $2 to $4 a month more than the immigrant is
   paying for an apartment of the same size in a better state of repair.
   (Breckenridge 128) (8) 

Being forced out of one's home even if dilapidated, knowing the rent is exorbitant but having no recourse, being kept out of unions and therefore the better jobs seeing traditional black occupations taken over by "foreigners" and having no choice but to accept grueling work "for which [one] competed with many immigrants whose only English words were the digits of their laborer's number," as Oscar Micheaux says of a black steel-mill worker in The Conquest (1913) (qtd. in Henri 32): such experiences--individual and community-wide--made many African Americans bitterly resent the huge numbers of immigrants arriving in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In a letter to the editor critical of white women's advocacy for immigrants but not for blacks, one woman wrote to The Crisis in 1914 on the question of woman's suffrage, which the magazine supported, that she did not believe white women with the vote would benefit African America. After all, the writer says, look at the present situation. "Should not the white women consider the betterment of the colored people as well as the foreigner who comes to our shores, because conditions are better here than in his own country?" ("Votes for Women" 179). (9) She recounts asking a white woman speaker at a public meeting why white women do not speak out against lynching and the anti-miscegenation laws that target blacks, to which she reports the white woman's dodging the question with the answer: "For my part, I do not believe in marriages between Americans and Europeans" (179). Rather than defend black Americans' civil rights, this white speaker proffers her anti-immigrant racism as justification, presumably, for her opposition to all interracial unions. As such an encounter makes vivid, for many black Americans the issue of immigrants created political as well as economic alarm. Was their welfare--even if their civil rights were being contested--going to supplant the welfare of African Americans in the white political imagination, much as their labor was threatening blacks in the day-to-day struggle for economic survival?

Black leadership split on these questions. Although better known for their oppositional views on education, the two most powerful figures, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, also disagreed fundamentally on whether to fear or ally with immigrants. Washington, viewing them as an enemy of black labor, aligned himself with white nativists, who typically hated blacks, of course, as much or more than the newcomers from eastern and southern Europe and Ireland. Recognizing that fact, Du Bois repeatedly argued for coalition between blacks and immigrants. Although well aware of the painful truth that most immigrants quickly learned to embrace anti-black racism, including in the labor unions that welcomed them but not African Americans, he insisted that political alliance was in the black community's best interest.

Washington believed his position better served the ordinary black worker. In a letter to him in 1908 a white nativist expresses his opinion and, as he states, that "of all of my friends," that Italians should be kept out of the state of Virginia. The letter-writer argues: "To introduce a foreign race, and a very low form, perhaps one of the lowest, of the white races into the South, will mean a serious complication. To educate the negro [sic], and then have a foreigner work for half of what he can live on, means offsetting the good effect of proper education and training." (10) The letter-writer could count on Washington's sharing his view about Italians as a danger to black workers. In his well known 1895 Atlanta Address at the Cotton States Exposition, the famous Tuskeegeean had urged whites not to "look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South." Instead, he stated in words designed to characterize Southern blacks as happy docile workers and immigrants as unionized provocateurs: "I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among the eight million negroes ... who have without strikes and labor wars tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities" (qtd. in Fuchs 295). Washington never swerved from this position that immigrants in the South placed black jobs in jeopardy. Fifteen years later, writing about an attempt to replace black with Italian laborers on a cotton farm in Arkansas, he states with obvious relief: "Mr. John M. Gracie, the man who employed the Italians to which Mr. Stone refers, has gotten rid of the Italians and replaced them with Negro labor" (Harlan and Smock 10: 363-64). (11)

When Washington did take a stand against a pending immigration restriction bill toward the end of his life in a 1915 letter to the editor of the New York World, he did so not because he supported Europeans coming to the U. S. but because the legislation would bar entry of blacks from Liberia, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica. The proposed legislation, Washington says, "puts an unnecessary slight upon colored people by classing them with alien criminals." (12) Washington's adoption of the phrase "alien criminals" aligns him with nativists who wished to restrict immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. Unlike those newcomers, black immigrants in Washington's opinion "have never become Anarchists"--another loaded term, much like "terrorist" in our own era--"or as a class given trouble to the Government" (Harlan and Smock 13:209). (13) When invited to contribute a piece to the Jewish Immigration Bulletin that same year, Washington not surprisingly speaks in vague and platitudinous terms. He says immigrants contribute to American life, they simply want to improve their lot, and, a bit more interesting, they get blamed with blacks for urban problems not of their own making. (14) But a letter he wrote to a University of Alabama student that same year is more forthright. Although Washington claims not to oppose European immigration, he advises "the colored people to see to it that they must take advantage of their opportunities in the South or else they will be crowded to the wall by others who will come in and get more out of the soil than they get out of it." In addition to this warning for blacks, he has one for whites. "I have some personal feelings, however, as to how well European emigrants and our native Southern people will get on together, but this has nothing to do with the direct matter of European emigrants coming into the South" (Harlan and Smock 13:222). Southern whites are not going to like the new immigrants, Washington has a hunch--or more likely, hopes. In his view white animosity toward immigrants will benefit black laborers, who must depend for their survival on the wealth of white America flowing their way. Siding with white nativists simply makes good sense.

W. E. B. Du Bois vehemently disagreed. Instead of fanning anti-immigrant anxiety, he urged alliance. He turned the idea of Southern whites believing themselves superior to blacks as well as to people of every other nationality into an argument for coalition among all people of color, including globally. He maintained that racism is racism and must be called out and combated in all its guises. In an article for the American Journal of Sociology in 1908, Du Bois groups people of color when discussing white racism: "If we assume the white South as planted immovably on the proposition that most human beings are to be kept in absolute and unchangeable serfdom and inferiority to the Teutonic world; and if we assume that not only the Negroes of America but those of Africa and the West Indies--not only Negroes, but Indians, Malays, Chinese, and Japanese, not to mention the Mediterranean lands--are determined to contest this absurd stand to the death, then the world has got some brisk days ahead" (Aptheker 1: 387). In an essay for The Editorial Review in 1910 rifled "The Economic Aspects of Race Prejudice," Du Bois continues this emphasis on U. S. racism's global and multiracial dimensions. He says the U. S. wish to increase exports to Asia, Africa, the West Indies, and South America is bringing the nation "face to face with the unpleasant fact that America is not liked in the darker world; she has gone out of her way to insult many of these people. She has enslaved 'Niggers,' sneered at 'Dagos,' insulted Chinese and Japanese, and found no words too contemptuous to express her feeling for the 'mongrel' races of Central and Southern America" (Aptheker 2:2). Similarly, in his well-known "The Souls of White Folk" (1910), Du Bois yokes anti-black and anti-immigrant racism. He exclaims with bitter sarcasm: "Peace? ... How can there be peace for those who are white and hate 'niggers'? Democracy? Absurd! Dream of infants! ... Does free America want to enfranchise any more dagoes and hybrids?" (27) True to his own insistence on inclusivity, Du Bois in "Socialism Is Too Narrow for Negroes" (The Socialist Call, 1911) states that African Americans cannot embrace socialism as long as it bans Asian laborers (40-41).

Under Du Bois's leadership, The Crisis--where Fauset served as literary editor from 1919-1926--reflected this view that anti-black and anti-immigrant racism are linked. (15) To be sure, advocating for European immigrants was not a major focus. The Crisis' major focus in its first decade as a publication was anti-lynching. With black people being murdered by racist whites in public spectacles witnessed by white authorities who stood by approvingly or even participated, the magazine's primary political purpose was unrelenting advocacy for the anti-lynching mission of its parent organization, the NAACP. Nevertheless, opposition to racism in all its forms did constitute a foundational principle for both the organization and the magazine. Therefore, it is not surprising that throughout the years leading up to the publication of The Sleeper Wakes occasional articles and entries appeared that kept the reality of anti-immigrant racism and its connection to anti-black racism before readers.

Indeed, the premier issue of The Crisis insists on that connection. The November 1910 editorial states: "Two Italians were lynched in Florida. The Italian Government protested, but it was found that they were naturalized Americans. The inalienable right of every free American citizen to be lynched without tiresome investigation and penalties is one which the families of the lately deceased doubtless deeply appreciate" (11). The next issue prints a letter to the editor from a white man who admits "I grew up with a personal repugnance to black folks and Jews" and goes on to observe: "The race prejudice against 'Chink' and 'Jap' and 'Hindu,' almost as strongly as against 'Nigger,' is one of the most persistent of our [white people's] savage traits" ("From a Northern White Man" 29). Articles by whites well-known for their advocacy of immigrant rights, such as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis, appear in various issues, and an article on "The Filipino in the United States" in 1911, reprinted from a Spokane, Washington publication, makes this comparison: "Filipino citizens and residents of this country are treated with more discourtesy and disrespect in Seattle than the Negroes of the South where most rabid race prejudice exists" (254).

This linkage of blacks and immigrants as racist targets is not hard to find in The Crisis between 1910 and 1920. For example, a narrativized white in "A Collect" in the September 1914 issue asks: "What is the color of your skin? I see. You are a nigger. You are a damned dago.... The yellow peril. The ignorant dirty emigrant. The two for a quarter six for a half dollar mill slave.... You are the godforsaken Polack. You are the hook-nosed Jew. You are the monkeyfaced Irishman. You are the beerguzzled deutscher" (227). The same racist inclusivity shows up more horribly in a short story published two months later, "The Golden-Faced People: A Story of the Chinese Conquest of America." In its last section, titled bluntly "The White Race Still Supreme," the narrative presents a grisly democratic panorama that illustrates the unity of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant, and anti-black racism in the U. S.

Across the street dangled four men, hanged by the neck till they were dead. An officer pointed to the nearest.

"That's your Chinaman," he said.

"Who hung him?"

"The mob."

"Who is the next man?"

"That is a Japanese."

"Who is the next?"

"That is just a Greek."

"What did he do?"

The Irishman laughed. "I dunno," he said, "these foreigners have to keep out of the way, I suppose." Then by way of information he added: "The Greeks are an awful ignorant people."

"Who is the fourth man?"

"Oh, that's just a nigger." (Lindsay 41) (16)

Underscoring this connection between anti-black and anti-immigrant racism, a 1914 Crisis editorial opposed to a United States war on Mexico asks with obvious sarcasm why issues of race are even being raised: "This was not true when we gaily 'liberated' Cuba and benevolently assimilated the Philippines. What did we care for race problems then? We had our problems settled easily and fluently. All 'niggers,' 'dagoes,' 'chinks,' 'Japs' and 'mongrels' were inferiors and consequently easy to whip and keep whipped." Therefore, the editorial asks: "Why not Mexico with its millions of brown peons?" ("Mexico" 79)

As such examples indicate, The Crisis in its first decade saw as part of the commitment to fighting anti-black racism a commitment to standing up against anti-immigrant racism as well. Other black journals and newspapers endorsed anti-immigrant views. Arnold Shankman explains that the threat to African American jobs "caused some black editors to project images of Chinese as idolatrous opium smokers, Japanese as disloyal, Mexicans as lazy, and Italians as bomb-throwing anarchists. If these negative stereotypes corresponded to what many Americans were saying about the immigrants, so much the better" (xiii). Often black publications simply reprinted anti-immigrant pieces from mainstream sources. As Jeff Diamond points out: "It was not uncommon for black papers [at the turn of the century] to echo the racism of white restrictionists. An article printed in the A. M. E. Church Review in 1905 asserted that 'The swarthy Italian, the stolid and stupid Slav, the untidy Jew, the Greek, the Turk, and the Assyrian' were 'peoples widely separated from us in their traditions, customs and civilization, and giving but little promise of sympathy with or conformity to our national institutions or ideals'" (455). The Crisis, however, eschewed such attacks. As Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis emphasizes, W. E. B. Du Bois especially "deplored the collusion of nativists and labor unionists" (90). Condemning immigration restriction in the January 1920 issue of The Crisis--"Immigration is still cut off and a despicable and indefensible drive against all foreigners is shutting the gates of opportunity to the outcasts and victims of Europe," Du Bois proceeds immediately to urge alliance between blacks and immigrants: "Very good. We will make America pay for her Injustice to us and to the poor foreigner by pouring into the open doors of mine and factory in increasing numbers" ("Brothers" 105). Immigration restriction might open jobs for African Americans, Du Bois recognizes. (17) But the black fight for justice must always be waged on behalf of all people targeted by racism in Du Bois's opinion. As Lewis states: "He would have no truck with those Negro leaders who cynically applauded immigration restriction as a boon to black labor" (90).

Fauset's The Sleeper Wakes echoes that theme, using fiction to push it further. The text suggests why such bedfellows are unholy. The novella does not deal with labor in the sense that Du Bois, Washington, and the AFL spoke about it. Amy Boldin neither works, nor wishes to work, in a factory. But she is an unskilled worker who must negotiate the marketplace, which is, the narrative insists, both raced and gendered. Amy works as a clerk, waitress, artist's model, dressmaker, and upscale housekeeper until she sells herself on the marriage market to Wynne, a rich white man she acknowledges she does not love. At the end, divorced, she must again set out to find paid employment. Issues of economics, work, race, and gender thread the text, and what Amy learns is the fundamentally Du Boisian lesson that lining up with anti-immigrant whites does not, finally, benefit a black person. For an African American to ally herself for economic reasons with white racism--which Fauset identifies in Wynne as anti-immigrant as well as anti-black--is to engage in a profoundly self-destructive act.

The Sleeper Wakes shows that anti-black and anti-immigrant racism intimately connect. As soon as Amy only gently objects to Zora's racist disdain of immigrants, she has climbed in bed with the enemy--which is literally what we see next. Her friendship with Zora leads directly to her marriage to the elegant white racist Stuart Wynne, who advocates lynching, divorces Amy when she identifies herself as African American, and insults and abandons her when she refuses to become his mistress.

Fauset's narrative takes care to lay out in explicit terms the misogynist and racist logic of Wynne's ruthless economics, the sequence of events that lead up to his redefinition of Amy from white to black, from wife to prostitute--that is, his crude redefinition of her as sex worker. For Wynne, Amy is an economic dependent with no legal rights or job protection, a unit of human labor the white man can subject to physical and verbal abuse and hire or fire at will. As a white wife, Amy's job consists of pleasing Wynne in return for economic support. She runs his household, publicly displays his wealth, provides a modicum of sexual service, flatters and humors him, and presides over his domestic social life. This is vapid, degrading work, but even this work evaporates once she states she is not white. As a black woman, Amy figures for the white man only as a sexual worker to be used and discarded. This raced economic critique repeats in Fauset's later novel, Plum Bun (1929), in which she bluntly rifles a central chapter "Market." As Deborah McDowell observes, the interracial gender/economic relationship in that novel, which The Sleeper Wakes anticipates, replays originary U. S. race history:

    Ironically, while Angela fights to reach her goal [of marriage] she
   doesn't realize that Roger is not after marriage.... Their trips
to the
   market are for two radically different commodities. For her, the plum
is
   power and influence attainable only through marriage to a wealthy
white
   man. For him, the plum is sex, to be bought and consumed.
Angela's game
   play for marriage is Roger's foreplay for sex. Finally and
ironically,
   Angela tries to "buy" in a society that only allows her to
"sell."
   ("Introduction," xix) 

Amy's transformation in The Sleeper Wakes--from the white wife to the black prostitute--exposes the fallacy at the root of raced, accommodationist economic arguments such as Booker T. Washington's that working-class blacks can or should place trust in the white social system.

To appreciate this argument in Sleeper, it is important to note that Amy's awakening begins with a black/white labor issue: Wynne's rage at a black servant who fails to mail a letter for him. The rich white employer heaps on the young man "a storm of abuse" full of oaths and racial epithets and then, tellingly, insults the young man's sister: "If your brains are a fair sample of that black wench of a sister of yours--" (591). At this twofold attack on his sister (her intelligence, her sexual virtue) the young man shouts: " 'You devil! ... You white-faced devil! I'll make you pay for that!' He raised his arm ..." (592). Blasted into consciousness by the imminent violence, Amy wakes up. She urges the servant to flee, to which Wynne shrieks:

    "Are you mad? Didn't you hear him threaten me, me,--a
nigger threaten
   me?" His voice broke with anger, "And you're letting
him get away! Why,
   I'll get him, I'll set blood-hounds on him, I'll have
every white man in
   this town after him! He'll be hanging so high by
midnight--" he made for
   the other door, cursing, half-insane. (592) 

The scene marks the turning point of the novella. White male racist rage provoked by even the most trivial challenge to the absolute supremacy of white power quickly turns into an attack on black manhood (the "storm of abuse") that also trades in misogynist contempt for black women (the insults leveled at the man's sister), and this rage leads directly to a resolve to lynch the black man who has the audacity to object. Here the raced and gendered economic narrative of The Sleeper Wakes climaxes. To prevent the lynching, Amy stops passing. Although she has never been entirely sure of her racial heritage--a deliberate textual ambiguity that serves to call into question the whole idea of race as a biological reality--Amy arrests Wynne in his tracks with the statement: "I am colored.... If you lynch this boy, I'll let the world, your world, know that your wife is a colored woman" (593). Forced to a split-second decision to declare whether she is black or white, affected by or indifferent to racism, allied with or superior to the black working-class employee at the white man's mercy, Amy chooses to be black, identifying specifically as an African American woman. She names herself as the most despised figure Wynne can imagine and in so doing elevates political struggle above economic security.

In The Sleeper Wakes Fauset joins other early twentieth-century writers such as Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Nella Larsen in exposing the economic dependence of wives as a form of prostitution, a legalized exchange of sex for money. (18) But published in The Crisis for a primarily black readership, Fauset's raced and gendered economic plot also comments on Washingtonian emphasis on black working-class acquiescence in white racism in order to achieve economic stability. Such acquiescence gets named as a form of prostitution. This narrative says that compromise of one's full potential in a racist society to secure economic gain (recall that Amy enters the union with Wynne admitting that she does not love him) and hiding one's identity as a black person in order to preserve white economic patronage must lead to failure. It's a fool's bargain. The white man is not going to share white wealth in any significant way with anyone but other whites.

Why then, it is important to ask, does Fauset identify both Wynne and Zora as anti-immigrant? The identification is not needed to tell Amy's story of awakening to the reality of anti-black racism, including the imprudence of depending too entirely on whites for economic support; that narrative stands whether Wynne and Zora are anti-immigrant or not. Read one way, Zora's casual abhorrence of dirty "foreigners" in New York City and Wynne's equally casual application of racial slurs to anyone who is not white simply reinforce the text's explicit narrative about anti-black racism. The references function as add-ons, bonus bits of information to make Zora and Wynne as despicable as possible. The two entitled whites dislike everyone not like themselves.

But the references also, when read in historical context, inevitably and in addition engage the larger Du Boisian/Washingtonian debate at the time within the black community about how to think about anti-black racism in relation to anti-immigrant racism, which by 1920 was on the rise once again throughout the U. S. as immigration increased following its brief cessation during World War One and preceding its restriction in the 1920s. (19) Wynne is overtly anti-black and anti-immigrant. Zora, however, we only know as anti-immigrant. She disappears from the text soon after Wynne enters and she never knows Amy is African American. Zora's anti-immigrant racism is not prelude to revelation of anti-black attitudes. So all we can do is wonder: Would she be as anti-black as she is anti-foreigner? Which is the point, I believe. Anti-immigrant racism is directly linked to anti-black racism after Amy marries Wynne, a figure who becomes obviously loathsome and dangerous in her life. But that linkage is absent in the representation of Zora. She therefore presents a more difficult because more ambiguous case for Amy--a kind of test-case on racism in general for her to negotiate before she encounters Wynne's crude anti-black hatred. That is, Fauset could easily have had Zora make racist comments about blacks in New York City instead of or in addition to immigrants--a move that would force Amy early in the text to decide how to identify racially and how to respond to racism that targets her. Having Zora make anti-foreigner remarks instead puts Amy in a more complex position. Do such remarks constitute racist attacks on blacks as well? Can a black person go along with anti-immigrant racism and not be oppressing herself? Amy does mildly object to Zora's ugly remarks, but stays in the friendship. After all, Zora is not attacking her.

Or is she?

That question had to be especially painful and bitter in 1920 while the 1917 massacre of East St. Louis remained vivid in the minds of black people, the primary audience of The Crisis. Fauset's two references to anti-immigrant racism in The Sleeper Wakes--indicating, I believe, her wish to underscore the topic--and her linking it very directly by means of Wynne to anti-black racism and lynch-mentality lead me to think about Fauset's narrative not only in the general context of lynching in early twentieth-century America but also and quite specifically in the context of the white racist terrorism in East St. Louis that resulted in homelessness, trauma, countless injuries, and violent death for African Americans.

Most articles in The Crisis in its first decade were not long. Typically, the magazine ran short items on various topics and issues with essays ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages. Departing from that practice, The Crisis article titled "The Massacre of East St. Louis" (September 1917) runs nineteen pages. Authored jointly by Martha Gruening and W. E. B. Du Bois, both sent to St. Louis as "special investigators of the recent outrages," the article is substantial, filled with gruesome details, illustrated with graphic photographs including corpses of lynched black victims, and from its opening paragraph, enraged: "On the 2nd of July, 1917, the city of East St. Louis in Illinois added a foul and revolting page to the history of all the massacres of the world. On that day a mob of white men, women and children burned and destroyed at least $400,000 worth of property belonging to both whites and Negroes; drove 6,000 Negroes out of their homes; and deliberately murdered, by shooting, burning and hanging, between one and two hundred human beings who were black" (219). The article then states: "Such an outbreak could not have been instantaneous. There must have been something further reaching even than an immediate cause to provoke such a disaster" (219). Most obvious as "something further reaching" is the whole ethos of lynching and violent anti-black racism in the United States in the 1910s which was growing so flagrant that more than two dozen race riots would erupt at the end of the decade, causing the summer of 1919 to be known as the Red Summer. Indeed, East St. Louis blacks quoted by Gruening and Du Bois in 1917 repeatedly cite southern U. S. racism as the model for the attack unleashed upon them.

But also prominent in the article as "something further reaching" is the more specific history in East St. Louis of immigrant laborers being deported during the war, Southern black migrants therefore being able to get factory jobs (but not union membership), and blacks being hired as strikebreakers when white workers went on strike. The Crisis often urged Southern blacks to migrate to the North, a flight from oppression that the magazine at various times explicitly compared with the flight of immigrants from Europe. (20) This Crisis article explains the possible benefit of such an exodus to blacks: "The war, by the deportation of white foreign workers, caused a scarcity of labor and this brought about the beginning of a noticeable influx of Negroes from the South. Last summer 4,500 white men went on strike in the packing plants of Armour & Co., and Swift & Co., and Negroes from the South were called into the plants as strike-breakers. When the strike ended the Negroes were still employed and that many white men failed to regain their positions" (220). The article also reprints in full a racist letter sent by the Secretary of the Central Trades and Labor Union in East St. Louis in May 1917 informing white union members that some "drastic action must be taken" to deal with these blacks who "are being used to the detriment of our white citizens" (221). The Crisis asks in outrage why Southern blacks are targeted in this way by white labor unions when recent immigrants and their descendants are not. "It is not that foreigners--Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians--or whatever ethnic division is least indigenous to East St. Louis--it is not that they are ousting Americans of any color or hue, but the 'Southern Negro,' the most American product there is, is being used 'to the detriment of our white citizens' " (220). Clearly, The Crisis is saying, the real targets of racism in the U. S. are not immigrants but African Americans, who are also the real natives: the people most--not least--entitled to call themselves Americans because of generations of ancestors who labored unpaid, unfree, and under brutal conditions to build the nation. Black and immigrant fates are not the same in this country. Black and immigrant claims of injustice are not equal, and black people are getting played off as pawns in the immigration/assimilation game. Newcomers, people from even the most foreign places--Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians--are receiving acceptance (union jobs, better housing, eventual white privilege) while blacks continue to be excluded, exploited, and murdered. This anti-foreigner anger is unusual for The Crisis. It no doubt reflects, however, the widespread, understandable rage felt in the African American community in the wake of the East St. Louis massacre.

Fauset's novella three years later reminds readers that immigrants are not the problem. White Americans are. Published at a time of renewed immigration at the end of World War I prior to the restrictionism of the 1920s, The Sleeper Wakes says that hating immigrants is not a good option for black people. It puts you in bed with Wynne, a white racist who hates blacks and thinks lynching is a good idea. It lines you up with him. Amy's mild protest to her white girlfriend's nativist racism early in the narrative--"They are all people just like anybody else, just like you and me, Zora," (583)--does give us hope that Amy will wake up and in the end repudiate racism. But not until she witnesses overt anti-black racism in her white husband, who shares the same ugly anti-foreigner sentiments as Zora, does Amy make a clear break with white racism. And that break asks readers, I argue, to think about the foundational connection between anti-immigrant and anti-black racism, the way that the two circulate comfortably and interchangeably in the white world, as epitomized in Fauset's novella by her not-accidentally named powerful Southern white man: Wynne.

In The Sleeper Wakes Wynne ends up advocating lynching and striking Amy in an act of explicitly racialized violence, lashing her repeatedly with the word "nigger" until she lies at his feet in an iconic image that reverberates in black women's fiction. (21) But even before this happens, we see him glibly and nonchalantly group "guineys" and "niggers" and "wops." The first term alone makes the point that white racism's targeting of blacks and of recent immigrants must be understood as allied. Although seldom heard today, "guiney," etymologically derived from the name of the west African nation, Guinea, was a common racial slur used to refer to Africans and darker-skinned people in general. In the U. S. it specifically designated blacks and Italians. Wynne's litany, in other words, quite literally lays out the interconnectedness of antiblack and anti-immigrant racism. The two collapse into one racism in the first term he deploys, "guineys," which he then in effect glosses with the words "niggers" and "wops." Anti-immigrant racism in the U. S., as Fauset's language insists, has its roots in originary anti-African racism. (22) Nativism by definition invokes anti-black racism.

The Crisis article on East St. Louis shows that nativism could be tempting for African Americans when Fauset wrote, which is no harder to understand than black anxiety about immigrants today. Doubtless thinking especially of Booker T. Washington, John Higham says of the South in particular at the turn of the century that it was not only whites who feared and resented immigrants. "The Negroes too distrusted the 'Third Force' entering the southern racial world, for the newcomers did their work and sometimes came as their competitors" (Strangers 169). But as Florette Henri points out, when African Americans have at various points in U. S. history lined up with white nativists even for what might seem at the time good reasons, "believing that their American nativity gave them the status of co-equals," they have inevitably found that the move only leads to "tightening the chains of racism around themselves" (148). That is exactly what we see in The Sleeper Wakes. Amy's friendship with anti-immigrant Zora leads directly to her marriage to Wynne, who is racist toward both immigrants and blacks. This marriage, to use Henri's image, tightens the chains of racism around Amy. She finds herself physically assaulted, verbally battered, and economically abandoned. Anti-immigrant racism one hundred years ago, as is true today, endangers African Americans along with immigrants because the roots of the two intertwine. When anti-Arab racism erupted in the United States following the Al Qaeda attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, many African Americans joined the nativist chorus. They heaved a sigh of relief because racism would now target others, not them. But they were wrong, of course. The system of white racism is capacious enough to include people of color everywhere in the world.

Finally, Amy's awakening includes precisely that Du Boisian recognition: U. S. racism and Western imperialism connect. That idea is repeatedly expressed in The Crisis in its first decade. Oppression of people of color in the United States must be understood not just domestically but also within an international framework. Anti-black racism, anti-immigrant racism, and the West's global imperialism--"the huge intolerant carelessness characteristic of occidental civilization" (587) that Amy early in her marriage perceived in Wynne but did not take seriously--interconnect. Amy now sees that "racial distinction"

    helplessly, inevitably operated in making Wynne and his kind, cruel
or at
   best indifferent. Her reading for Wynne reacted to her thought--she
   remembered the grating insolence of white exploiters in foreign
lands,
   the wrecking of African villages, the destruction of homes in
Tasmania.
   She couldn't imagine where Tasmania was, but wherever it was, it
had been
   the realist thing in the world to its crude inhabitants.
      Gradually she reached a decision. There were two divisions of
people
   in the world--on the one hand insatiable desire for power; keenness,
   mentality; a vast and cruel pride. On the other there was ambition,
it is
   true, but modified, a certain humble sweetness, too much inclination
to
   trust, and unthinking, unswerving loyalty. All the advantages in the
   world accrued to the first division. But without bitterness she chose
the
   second. She wanted to be colored, she hoped she was colored. (605) 

Amy's ignorance about Tasmania and her condescending reference to its "crude inhabitants" reflect Fauset's realism; she keeps Amy's awakening credible by showing she still has much to learn. But that learning, this passage shows, has begun. Amy embraces her identity as black in America and she realizes it involves, finally, identification with colonized and racially targeted people of color everywhere.

Fauset's interest in parallels between black and immigrant communities and her commentary on U. S. immigrant/black relations show up in the two novels that followed The Sleeper Wakes, There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun. Immigrant and black children provide the inspiration for Joanna Marshall's artistic triumph in There Is Confusion, her performance of the lead-role as "America" in the Dance of the Nations at the District Line Theater in New York during World War One. As "America," Joanna executes a literal dance of passing for white that she then blasts apart on stage by removing her white mask when the packed house, calling for an encore, chants: "Let's see your face, America!" Joanna complies and says to the stunned audience: "I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War and my brother is 'over there' right now" (232). Enabling this definitive performative moment is Joanna's earlier walk through poor and working-class New York City neighborhoods where diverse groups of children play in the streets: "Italians, Jews, colored Americans, white Americans were there disporting themselves with more or less abandon, according to their peculiar temperament" (47). The barn game of the black children specifically motivates Joanna's dancing, but that game is just one of many created by immigrant, black, and poor white children. That is, the African American cultural expression--the black children's choreography--represents the most salient of these vernaculars for Fauset, but her construction of the scene also insists that the black children's experience is allied with, exists side by side with, the realities of immigrants and poor whites. The climax of There Is Confusion collects all those realities--immigrant and black and poor white--into Joanna's brilliant performance of "America," a performance danced by a black woman who proudly throws off white masks and mastery. (23)

By contrast, Plum Bun offers a glimpse of immigrant/black connection that stresses danger and division, not unity. Because his Brazilian immigrant mother fails to comprehend the seriousness of anti-black racism in the U. S., the father of Anthony Cross, who himself passes as Spanish rather than acknowledge his black heritage, is lynched by whites. Then, instead of that event's causing Anthony's mother to ally with blacks in the struggle against white racism, she abandons African America entirely. Fair-skinned enough to pass, she marries a white man and retreats permanently into white America. Plum Bun, published almost a decade after The Sleeper Wakes, provides in Anthony and his mother chilling examples of how U. S. whiteness succeeds in recruiting countless immigrants to its fundamental national project of anti-black racism.

In The Sleeper Wakes the paradigm of U. S. racism expands from whites as antiimmigrant (Zora on the streets of New York) to whites as anti-immigrant and antiblack (Wynne as revealed in his words and actions once married to Amy) to whites as anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-people-of-color globally (Wynne as Amy finally understands him after her divorce). Understood in relation to this pattern of racism, Amy's full and final awakening appears to mean this: For a black person to "pass" through life identifying with or tolerating white racism in any of its guises, an act of passing which, as in most passing narratives, we need to read symbolically and ideologically as well as literally, constitutes an embrace of all of the racist positions of whiteness and consequently represents, inescapably, an act of self-hatred. Amy cannot pick and choose which racist Wynne she lives with and which she does not. Anti-immigrant Wynne is anti-black Wynne is global imperialist Wynne. Fauset's text says to Crisis readers that a person can't go along with the white man's racism of any sort listen to him say "guineys" and "wops" or read with him his favorite tales of "white exploiters in foreign lands"--and not at the same time hear him say "niggers": that is, endorse and be party to perpetuating anti-black racism in the U. S.

Florette Henri recounts the story of the late nineteenth-century Oxford University professor, Edward A. Freeman, who referred to blacks as monkeys and apes and routinely joked on the lecture circuit that the remedy for the world's problems would be for a black man to kill an Irishman and be hanged for it (217). Fauset gives us no reason to believe that Wynne cracks jokes. If he did, however, he would find this one perfect. Domestic and global at one and the same time, it covers all bases for white racism, articulating the ideology's death-wish for African Americans and "undesirable" immigrants in the U. S. and, simultaneously, for black and other colonized people around the world. But Amy, Fauset tells us at the end of The Sleeper Wakes, has finally waked up. She would not find it funny.

Works Cited

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Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

--. Edith Wharton's Argument With America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980.

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Batker, Carol J. Native, African, and Jewish American Women's Literature and Journalism in the Progressive Era. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.

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Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000.

"Brothers, Come North." The Crisis 19 (January 1920): 105-06.

Clingman, James, Jr. "Hey Ya'll, When is the March for Black Folks?" The Broward Times 63 (12-18 May 2006): 6.

"A Collect." The Crisis 8 (September 1914): 226-27.

Diamond, Jeff. "African-American Attitudes towards United States Immigration Policy." International Migration Review 32.2 (Summer 1998): 451-70.

Doherty, Carroll. "Attitudes toward Immigration: In Black and White." 26 Apr. 2006. Pew Research Report. 11 May 2007: 1-3. <http://pewresearch.org /pubs/21/attitudes-toward-immigration-in-black-and-white>.

DuCille, Ann. "Blue Notes on Black Sexuality: Sex and the Texts of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen." American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender, and Race Since the Civil War. Eds. John Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. 193-219.

Fauset, Jessie. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. 1929. Boston: Beacon, 1990.

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--. There Is Confusion. 1924. New York: AMS, 1974.

"The Filipino in the United States." The Crisis 2 (October 1911): 254-55.

Fletcher, Bill. "Immigration and the Reparations Debate." Philadelphia Tribune 123 (25 May 2007): 7A. "From a Northern White Man." The Crisis 1 (December 1910): 29.

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Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Gruening, Martha, and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois. "The Massacre of East St. Louis." The Crisis 14 (September 1917): 219-38.

Harlan, Louis R., and Raymond W. Smock eds. The Booker T. Washington Papers. Vols. 9, 10, 13. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980, 1981, 1984.

Harper, Frances Ellen. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Ed. Frances Smith Foster. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Helwig, David. "Black Leaders and the United States Immigration Policy, 1917-1929." The Journal of Negro History 66.2 (Summer 1981): 110-27.

Henri, Florette. Black Migration: Movement North, 1900-1920. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1975.

Higham, John. Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

--. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1955.

Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. Ed. Richard Yarborough. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

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Jones, Sharon. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002.

Kirschke, Amy Helene. Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2007.

Kuenz, Jane. "The Face of America: Performing Race and Nation in Jessie Fauset's There Is Confusion." Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (Spring 1999): 89-111.

Lauter, Paul. From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Lieberson, Stanley. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants since 1880. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.

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McDowell, Deborah E. "Introduction: Regulating Midwives." Fauset, Plum Bun ix-xxxiii.

--. "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

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Notes

(1.) For overviews of this division, see Hutchinson, Page, Porter.

(2.) See, e.g., Fletcher or Waiters.

(3.) See, e.g., Miller, McLendon, Kuenz.

(4.) My references are to the Oxford UP reprint.

(5.) Although no criticism exists on The Sleeper Wakes, there is of course substantial recent scholarship on other work by Jessie Fauset. See Allen; Ammons, Conflicting; Batker; duCille; Goodman; Jones; McDowell, "Introduction" and Changing; McLendon; Wall.

(6.) See Fuchs, Shankman, Williamson, Lieberson, Helwig, Diamond.

(7.) For good discussion of nativist and racist ideology in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, see Gossett, Higham (both volumes), Takaki. On the nonwhite or not-quite-white status at the turn of the century of groups now regarded as white, such as Jews and people from Ireland, whose status in the second case was rapidly changing early in the twentieth century as whiteness sought to increase its ranks in the face of rising numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants and of Southern blacks migrating to the North, see Ignatiev and Brodkin. I take the term "not-quite-white" from Brodkin (72), who explains that "immigrants came to be seen as similar to black workers and Native Americans" at the turn of the century. "Asians or Mexicans and occasionally Europeans, were [said to be] so foreign, so savage, and such dangerous criminals that they could never be assimilated into American culture. When immigrants were seen as a necessary part of that working class which did the degraded and driven labor, they were constructed with stereotypes of blackness--stupid, shiftless, sexual, unable to defer gratification" (71).

(8.) This reference is to the reprint.

(9.) Du Bois's answer in this editorial states that he agrees about white women being no more "intelligent, liberal or humane toward the black, the poor and unfortunate than white men are" (179). However, he argues, the vote must nevertheless be a right for all women as well as all men.

(10.) Letter "From W. B. Watkins," Harlan and Smock 9: 508-09. These statements sometimes mistakenly attributed to Booker T. Washington appeared, in fact, in this letter written to him.

(11.) For discussion of black/Italian relations in the South at the time, which were marked by animosity on both sides, see Shankman 83-110.

(12.) For NAACP arguments against this proposed legislation and NAACP activism in opposition to it, see "The Immigration Bill."

(13.) "Anarchist" at the turn of the century characterized all immigrants from central, southern, and eastern Europe as agitators against capitalism and the U. S. government. One black newspaper in 1886 posed this rhetorical question: "'As between the peaceably disposed, industrious and frugal Chinaman and the lazy, drunken and revolutionary anarchist,' asked the New York Freeman, 'which is the more desirable class of immigrants?' " (Shankman 13). Yet, on the topic raised here regarding blacks and Chinese immigration, it should be pointed out that scholarship conflicts. Fuchs states that the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was "supported vigorously by the Afro-American press" (296) while Shankman says that as a matter of principle "most black newspapers opposed restrictions on Chinese immigration" (13). Historians do agree that black views of Chinese immigrants in general at the turn of the century were largely stereotypical and negative, as were Chinese immigrants' views of African Americans (see Shankman 3-32). Even here, however, it is important to note contradictions and exceptions. A letter to the editor of The Crisis in 1917 titled "A Protest from the Orient" and signed by "An Asiatic Gentleman" expresses solidarity with black Americans in their struggle against white racism. The letter-writer concludes with these words: "Please accept the enclosed check as an expression of my deep sympathy. I am enclosing another check on account of my subscription for the CRISIS, and will be glad to know if you accept aliens as members of your organization. Believe me to be one with you in your struggle for your rights as members of the human race" (164).

(14.) Washington's essay was titled "What Has the Immigrant Contributed to American Life." See Harlan and Smock 13: 369-70.

(15.) Fauset had worked closely with Du Bois at the magazine even before her name appeared on the masthead. See Lewis and also Kirschke, who notes that Du Bois "ran a very tight ship at The Crisis, and although prominent women in his editorial offices, such as Jessie Fauset, had important responsibilities, he did not regard them as equals" despite the fact that he "was publicly a strong advocate of women's rights" (210). On Fauset's romantic relationship with Du Bois, the end of which coincided with the end of her literary editorship at The Crisis, see Lewis, especially 49-50, 188-90.

(16.) Part of the irony of this scene, of course, lies in the fact that the policeman is Irish, a member of a stigmatized immigrant group allowed to move "up" in America to sufficient white status to permit him to stand by and laugh at the brutal lynching of two Asians, a southern European immigrant, and an African American. On the racism of the Irish in the U. S. as well as their own racialization and then gradual acceptance into whiteness, see Ignatiev. Also of interest here, given the representation of the Irish policeman in this Crisis story, is the magazine's argument in an editorial two years later titled "Ireland." The Crisis states that, despite the history of Irish racism against blacks in the U. S., readers should regard the oppression of the Irish in Ireland as they do their own in the U. S. Of U. S. Irish/black hatred, the editorial declares: "But all this is past" and then takes an international perspective: "Today we must remember that the white slums of Dublin represent more bitter depths of human degradation than the black slums of Charleston and New Orleans, and where human oppression exists there the sympathy of all black hearts must go. The recent Irish revolt may have been foolish, but would to God some of us had sense enough to be fools!" (167).

(17.) White also notes in The Crisis the correlation between immigration restriction and increased employment opportunities for African Americans, stating in "The Success of Negro Migration" in 1920: "As long as the tide of immigration is turned away from America rather than toward it, he [the black worker] will be able to enter into northern industry in ever increasing numbers" (115).

(18.) I analyze Wharton's economic feminism at length in Edith Wharton's Argument with America and the feminist arguments of Gilman, Wharton, Fauset, and Larsen in considerable detail in Conflicting Stories. Also see McLendon on Fauset's critique of the economics of marriage, particularly in relation to Gilman (43 ff.).

(19.) As Lauter explains: "In 1919 what many native-born Americans viewed as a 'deluge' of immigration, interrupted by the war, resumed." And with that resumption came a renewal of anti-immigrant sentiment. "This climate of fear and prejudice in the immediate aftermath of the war encouraged a variety of efforts to reassert the hegemony of Anglo-Saxon society: the Ku Klux Klan trumpeted the dominance of white, Protestant America; the trial and ultimately execution of Sacco and Vanzetti turned into a social imperative; the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 excluded Japanese altogether and virtually halted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe; Western Civilization requirements spread through the nation's major universities" (203).

(20.) See, e.g., "Brothers, Come North" or the 1916 editorial "Migration," which maintains: "The same reasons that drive the Jew from Russia, the peasants from Austria, the Armenians from Turkey and the oppressed from tyranny everywhere should drive the colored man out of the land of lynching, lawlessness and industrial oppression" (270).

(21.) See, e.g., Harper's Iola Leroy or Hopkins's Contending Forces.

(22.) The other originary racism of the nation, though not called up in The Sleeper Wakes, is of course anti-Indigenous racism, which anti-immigrant racism also drew on and exploited at the turn of the century to demonize immigrants from Asia and from southern and eastern Europe. See note 8.

(23.) For excellent discussion of performativity in There Is Confusion, see Kuenz.