With other turn-of-the-century Black intellectuals, Charles Chesnutt remained skeptical about the putative value of both human suffering and emotionally restrained and distanced responses to it. As a self-identified realist writing about race relations both during slavery and after Reconstruction, Chesnutt could not have ignored suffering altogether, yet representing it risked inadvertently perpetuating pernicious contemporary myths about Black inurement to pain. The challenge for Chesnutt across a range of fictional genres was to get a predominantly white audience to finally see Black suffering that they otherwise routinely ignore, discount, or deny. Upending racialized sensitivity hierarchies, Chesnutt flips the racist script that casts white people as sensitive to pain and Black people as insensitive to it. He also associates civilized superiority not simply with a remarkable sensitivity to suffering but with an even rarer inclination to respond altruistically even on behalf of those from whom the respondent feels demonstrably distanced.
Alberto, Paulina L. Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil
