Racialized Violence and Interraciality in 'Cane' Brianna Tong College

Jean Toomer’s Cane was written in response to the author’s time spent in Georgia teaching in rural black schools. Toomer, born and raised in affluent areas of the North, was surely surprised by many elements of his stay in the black rural South, but as is brutally evident in Cane, the racialized violence inherent and endemic to the South seemed to have left the deepest impression on the young writer, a man of multiracial heritage who grew up in both white and black communities in the North and who claimed to experience few crises of race, either internally or externally. Cane revolves around racial violence and the violence of race relations, which manifest in both the South and the North. However, the novel also constantly returns to quiet but pressing anxieties over interraciality. Although black people, and mixed-race people who are part black, have developed strategies for coping with the constant threat of violence against them, the structured violence of racist society defeats even the imagination of a race-less or race-tension-less existence. The naturalized violence of race and the corresponding and equally ubiquitous violence of interraciality disrupt possibilities for interracial interactions and relationships in the...