Beyond the ‘Melting Pot’: Black American Identifications across National and Ethnic Lines
by Kieran Sommer
Widespread practices of disparaging and othering immigrants to the country can be seen as illustrative of what has been a major point of contention in the United States since at least the Naturalization Act of 1790: who can rightfully belong to the US nation and live in its territory (Rottenberg 2008: 72). The prominence and longevity of this point of contention is understandable given it is so central to US national identity, self-understanding and the national economy. From the processing station on Ellis Island, to the melting pot and the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Lazarus 1889: 203), the tropes and imagery of immigration to the United States are familiar to us, whether we are Americans or nationals of other countries who have gained some familiarity with the United States and its culture, politics and literature.
Most dominant narratives of belonging to the US nation and citizenry presuppose an integration or assimilation of individuals into a mainstream culture, with the metaphor of melting having been used since at least the 1780s onwards to describe this process (McDonald 2007: 50). But crucially, many narratives of integration – including playwright Israel Zangwill’s ‘Melting Pot’, popularized by the 1908 play of the same name, or Elias Lieberman’s poem “I am an American” (1916) – did not envision or explicitly mention people of colour as contributing to the cultural or ethnic mixture of the US nation (Benn Michaels 2007: 60; Freedman 2005: 70).
Even legal definitions of citizenship or understandings of national territory may be simplistically misinterpreted as reflecting clear boundaries of belonging, such as that legal citizenship entitles to legitimate and equal belonging to the nation. However, these boundaries elude either/or-distinctions in various respects: Firstly, as contested as citizenship itself is, not even its legal gaining can be interpreted as unambiguously determining belonging to the nation itself. Secondly, the lived realities of US citizens of different ethnicities and genders show that citizenship does not entitle individuals to the full protections, rights and entitlements legally associated with citizenry. And thirdly, due to cross-national connections, legal US citizens may not identify themselves either with dominant understandings of nationality or narrowly with one national or ethnic identity. As I will show in the following text using the examples of Black American thinkers such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, we can find alternative conceptions of identities that are more transnational or transethnic in orientation, for instance in the period after the Civil War (1861–1865) to the turn of the nineteenth century.
Frederick Douglass: Composite Nationality and Black Specificity
Let me first define the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transethnic’: originally from the Latin ‘trans’ meaning “across or over” or “through, to the other side of”, the English prefix may refer to an “entrance into a new state” or “the sense of going beyond or exceeding” (Field 2013: 6–7). By extension, a transnational or transethnic identity goes beyond the narrow identification with one nation or ethnicity to form new kinds of identities or affinities. It could be argued that an American identity that amalgamates various ethnicities on an egalitarian basis is in itself transethnic. A prominent advocator for amalgamation of the United States’ ethnicities into one nation was Black American author and reformer Frederick Douglass, who proposes from the 1860s onwards that such ethno-racial merging would naturally develop in the United States (Sundstrom 2005: 151). In his speech “Our Composite Nationality” (1869), which was one of his lyceum lectures (Ray 2002: 638), he combines this with a call for Americans to include potentially all ethnicities in their nation, suggesting that “[i]f we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples” (1991: 256). As soon as immigrants to the country learn English and “the duties of citizenship”, he proposes, they could become naturalized citizens, voters, officeholders and members of the US body politic (251, 256). Douglass scholar John McKivigan describes the Black reformer’s conception of composite nationality as expressing the belief in a national melting pot, in “which all peoples and cultures would assimilate into a superior new American culture freed [of] racist and ethnic prejudices” (2018: 275) and in which all, including Asian, Black and Indigenous people, “bow to the same law [and] enjoy the same liberty” (1991: 259). Douglass also links the possibility for members of every nation to make a life for themselves in (North) America with previously unreached civilizational achievement. Literary Studies scholar Julie Husband interprets this as promoting a new US exceptionalism based on its composite character (2018: 236–38), American exceptionalism being a widespread feature of US lyceum lectures (Ray 2002: 638).
However, Douglass’s use of exceptionalism interlinks the national explicitly with the universal: he suggests, for instance, that through the effective uses of the United States’ human, political and natural resources, the country could become the “perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family” (253). This is not only to the benefit of the whole nation but, according to Douglass, natural law, human rights and providential common humanity are all indisputable justifications for such an intermixing of cultures and peoples (251). Thus depicted, the United States has the potential to become a nation that includes other ethnicities and nationalities on an egalitarian basis, but this also illustrates the advantages of such a multi- or transethnic nationality.
Communication Studies scholar Angela Ray describes Douglass’s interlinking of internal pluralism and unity in this speech as paradoxical (Ray 2002: 639, 642) and he certainly remains vague about the extent to which members of different ethnicities would have to conform to US practice or norms. In other speeches, he clearly conceives of African Americans as having a distinct place in the contemporary United States: in an antebellum speech in New York, “A Nation in the Midst of a Nation” (1853), for instance, Douglass expresses the view that African Americans, both free and enslaved, were aliens separate from, but placed among, the White US nation (2018: 97, 100). Also after emancipation, there are indications of him sensing that Black Americans remained separate from the wider US nation and he acknowledges the specificities of African American citizenry, its agency and the importance of racially distinct strategies to attain equal rights within the United States. For example, in 1881 Douglass stated before a Black audience in Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C. that they were assembled “not merely as American citizens, but as colored American citizens”, further adding, “[o]ur relation to the American people makes us in some sense a peculiar class, and unless we speak separately, our voice is not heard” ([1892] 2022: 397).
W.E.B. Du Bois: Intraracial Development and Universal Benefit
A similar awareness of African American specificity or peculiarity with regard to the US nation due to their history and contemporary situation is prominently conceptualized by W.E.B. Du Bois in his essay collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which brought the Black academic, author and activist international prominence and authority as an expert on African American issues (Edwards 2008: vii). “One ever feels his twoness,” Du Bois writes, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” ([1903] 2008: 8). According to Du Bois, the Black American develops “this double-consciousness”, a sense of self shaped by an awareness of being viewed and (d)evaluated from dominant White standpoints (8). As sociologist and Cultural Studies theorist Paul Gilroy explains, Du Bois’ double consciousness “emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being, and seeing”: the “racially particularistic”, the “nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state” and the “diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist” (1993: 127). Du Bois identifies the “racially particularistic”, the nationally and transracially-oriented as causing a divided or doubled self, yet also regards these orientations as reconcilable, with both the American and the Black containing potential through which humanity can develop further ([1903] 2008: 9).

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) photographed by Cornelius Marion Battey, c. 1919
This concept of double consciousness has been criticized for its perspectival shortcomings, for instance by Du Bois scholar Shamoon Zamir for generalizing about his Black compatriots using psychological dispositions that were mostly restricted to Black American intellectual and professional elites (Zamir 2008: 29–30) or by Religious Studies scholar Biko M. Gray and philosopher Ryan J. Johnson, who suggest that Du Bois’ division of self does not account for the compounded or intersectional experiences of Black women (2023: 29–31). Yet African and African American Studies scholar Mzukisi Lento also asserts its liberating and beneficial potential for everyone with multiple, and partly conflicting, identities (2021: 64), especially when individuals experience oppression due to these identity categories.
Du Bois acknowledges such Black oppression by, and segregation from, White Americans (see for example [1903] 2008: 68), yet claims too that if there is “substantial agreement” between the laws, territories, language and religion of different races in one country, these can live in harmonious co-existence for the better advancement of all (18). Du Bois also clearly sees his Black compatriots as “Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go” (184), as he phrases it in a speech before the American Negro Academy in 1897. However, it is important to note that Du Bois upholds Black American cultural distinctness above the baseline of shared US traits and opposes assimilation that simply reflects the dominance in national ideals of the “English New England stock” in the 1922 article “Americanization” (1996: 384). In a commencement address in 1898 at the historically Black Fisk University, Du Bois explains as well that just as other nations work for their own betterment, “it is the duty of the Negro to serve his blood and lineage, and so working, each for each, and all for each, we realize the goal of each for all” (1970: 93). For some scholars, Du Bois’ rhetoric of “blood” in racial contexts is believed to imply a biological essence as a basis of race (Hancock 2008: 88) or that his understanding of race relies on “scientific conceptions” of his time (Appiah 1985: 25), while others see him attaching greater importance to the socio-historical or cultural aspects of race (Hancock 2008: 88). Du Bois may presuppose the distinctiveness of races, but he also believes that each ethno-racial group with its individual abilities can work towards the benefit of humanity as a whole. For Black Americans more specifically, he envisions a self-development in The Souls of Black Folk “in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic”, which both implies that they are vital for US society and will be able to add their “characteristics” to those of White Americans in future for the mutual benefit of both “world-races” ([1903] 2008: 13), the national thus having transethnic and even worldwide significance.
Apart from being interested in their race’s futures, Du Bois suggests that African Americans are also particularly inclined to see beyond racial differences: because they are confronted with “discussions of race” used to wrongfully disparage them, “consequently, [they have] been led to deprecate and minimize race distinctions, to believe intensely that out of one blood God created all nations, and to speak of human brotherhood as though it were the possibility of an already dawning to-morrow” (179).
Anna J. Cooper: The Necessity of Interracial Relations
The author, academic and orator Anna Julia Cooper reveals similar understandings of race in A Voice from the South(1892), a monograph that contains some of Cooper’s speeches and early writings (Hubbard 2010: 32). It received nationwide acclaim in both White and Black newspapers (May 2007: 20–21) and still remains a “foundational text of black feminist thought” (Glass 2005: 25). In the chapter “Has America a Race Problem; If So, How Can It Best Be Solved?”, she describes races as having individual traits that each can contribute to “the harmony of nations” (2022: 81), but in contrast to Du Bois, she refers to this explicitly as providentially ordained and warns of the detrimental impact of racial isolation for human communities. “Left entirely alone,” she writes, “out of contact, that is with other races and their opposing ideas and conflicting tendencies, this cult [of each race] is abnormally developed and there is unity without variety, a predominance of one tone at the expense of moderation and harmony, and finally a sameness, a monotonous dullness which means stagnation, – death” (2022: 81). The implication is that races only develop moderately and normally in contact with each other and if subjected to possible conflict, albeit of the peaceful kind as Cooper was committed to Christian love and criticized physical violence (Baker-Fletcher 2022: 277). Much like racial isolation, one race’s dominance and influence within society would lead to the nation’s and its races’ demise (Cooper 2022: 82, 85). She explains that the inclusion of foreigners and their abilities is a necessity for a nation if it wishes to progress (85), presupposing that the orientation outside of the national and racial is necessary for humanity’s growth.

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) photographed by C.M. Bell between February 1901 and December 1903
Nonetheless, Cooper recognises that due to their diverse ideological persuasions, the different nationalities coming together in US territory have also brought “conflicting elements” into contact (86). She ventriloquizes the nativist White Americans: “This is the white man’s country! […] Lynch, suppress, drive out, kill out! America for Americans! ‘Who are Americans?’ comes rolling back from ten million throats” (86). Thereby, she associates these White nationally exclusivist viewpoints with the violence against supposedly foreign and oppressed people in the United States, only to direct attention to the absurdity of exclusivist claims of being American by adding an answer from the ten million, either the Black or non-White Americans. Cooper goes on to asserts a commitment to democracy, namely that the United States have to be democratic “by necessity” and political action must be according to the will of majorities (2022: 87). Although she has been criticized by African American Studies scholars, such as Shirley Moody-Turner and Mary Helen Washington, for lacking self-awareness around speaking for the Black working class (Moody-Turner 2009: 87) or failing to base her policies on those class standpoints (Washington 2022: 262), Cooper argues for US democracy in this context by asserting that “no class, no family, no individual has ever been able to prove sufficient political legitimacy to impose their yoke on the country” (2022: 87).
Conclusions
Both Du Bois and Cooper create inclusive and multiracial visions of US society and Black American interconnections not just with their nominal compatriots, but with ethnicities worldwide. Thereby, they counter assimilationist or melting pot ideologies that require conformity with national ideals, which were often Anglo-American or dominant White in US history (McDonald 2007: 53). Regardless of how we see these statements and depictions by Douglass, Du Bois and Cooper against the background of their, or our, contemporary socio-political situations, they present conceptualizations of identity that both counter the discrimination and oppression of their own racialized groups as well as integrate Black Americans into a broader community of nations or ethnicities. Thereby, they also oppose impositions of dominant White assimilationist norms and elude such either-or logic of national belonging. By employing the terms of Americanness, US citizenship or political ideals, such as equality and democracy, Douglass, Du Bois and Cooper make these terms more inclusive and create a citizenship potentially unlimited by ethnicity, race or nationality in its affinities, identifications and working towards mutual benefit. Their alternative or even progressive conceptualizations of co-existence, though arguably not realized, point towards a more just and egalitarian future.
About the Author
Kieran Sommer is a postgraduate research assistant for the Chair of American Literature and Culture at Heidelberg University and working towards a PhD entitled “Triangulated Identities: Minoritized Ethnicities in Postbellum Black American Writings.” Kieran studied English and History at Heidelberg and Trinity College Dublin for his Master of Arts. His research interests include US and British literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, more specifically Black American literature, as well as nationalism and ethnic studies.
Contact: kieran.sommer@stud.uni-heidelberg.de
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