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Counterattack of Blood: Mixed-blood Question and 'White Nigger' Issue in Edward Sheldon's The Nigger

Edward Sheldon's play The Nigger(1909) dramatizes the color problem and the issue of mixed-blood in the South of America in the early 1900s. This play deals with the ups and downs in life of Philip Morrow, a white man of wealth and reputation, admired as the model citizen of the Southern white society. Philip happens to realize the truth of his racial identity that is a mixed blood, and suffers an experience of racial degradation. He denies his 'White Nigger' identity, but eventually accepts it as a whole identity of his own. The sense of responsibility leads Philip to the determination to work for black brethren whom he despised when he was a white. The body of mixed-blood or 'White Nigger' Philip embodies the variation of racial identity and the consequent development of his self-awareness. The blood logic, originally invented by the white as a safety fence to protect their racial purity, ironically comes flying back like a boomerang and disrupts the ideal of whiteness. Thus, the blood logic launches a counterattack to the white crowd in the play, leading them to disillusion that America is the nation of mixed-blood, ethnic blending, heterogeneity, and the synthesis of pluralistic and unitary impulses.