Undergoing Racial "Reassignment": The Politics of Transracial Crossing in Sinclair Lewis's Kingsblood Royal

Abstract

In Sinclair Lewis's Kingsblood Royal (1947), Neil Kingsblood, father of the rising middle-class Kingsblood family and complicit racist, assumes a black racial identity after discovering that an ancestor, Xavier Pic, was a "full-blooded Negro" (64), that his grandmother is an octoroon, and that he himself is "1/32 Negro" (78). Neil discovers his "true" racial identity after his father, thinking that the "king" in Kingsblood must denote some ancestral aristocracy, asks him to investigate the family's genealogy. Although Neil ultimately decides to embrace his black racial identity, Lewis's novel is not a racial uplift narrative; 1 Neil's "acceptance" of his mixed race descent is not about embracing an African-American cultural heritage in order to combat racism, "negrophobic" violence (Gaines), 2 or cultural stereotypes. Rather, Neil's claim to a black identity—his very ability to decide which racial identity he wants to adopt and his capacity to shift his racial self-identification—reflects Neil's privileged position as a white subject, as well as his racially romanticized assumptions about blackness. Unlike the post-Reconstruction racial uplift narratives by Frances Harper, Louise Burgess-Ware, and Ruth Todd that preceded Kingsblood Royal, 3 then, Lewis's novel does not envision racial identity as an allegiance to a political collective identity. Rather, Kingsblood Royal reifies white racial privilege even as the novel works to complicate whiteness and reveal the horrifying depths of racism in postwar America.

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