Passing as White Collar: The Black Typewriter and the Bureaucratization of the Racial Imaginary

Abstract

AbstractThe typewriter—the machine and the human operator at the nadir of the white-collar hierarchy—became associated with white female workers in the American racial imaginary. Although the color line deterred Black applicants from that side of the collar line, the Black typewriter as a literary type came to salience between 1886 and 1930, disrupting what I call the “bureaucratization of the racial imaginary”: the process whereby the exclusionary white middle-class tenets underpinning the bureaucratized office both regulated and were also informed by the imaginative possibilities of race, gender, and labor. Tracing the Black typewriter from Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt to Jean Toomer and Dorothy West, I reveal how these authors construed white-collar identity as a form of racial passing, requiring the worker's acceptance of racial and sexual segregation. Their innovative narratives about passing as white collar foregrounded the Black typewriter's unsettling experiences inside that system, challenging the theory that economic uplift would inherently promote racial and sexual equality.