SOURCE: “Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From ‘Blue Veins’ to Seventh-Street Rebels,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 289-321.

In the following essay, Foley probes Toomer's racial and class consciousness as expressed in the Washington, D. C. section of Cane.

Familiarity, in most people, indicates not a sentiment of comradeship, an emotion of brotherhood, but simply a lack of respect and reverence tempered by the unkindly … desire to level down whatever is above them, to assert their own puny egos at whatever damage to those fragile tissues of elevation which constitute the worthwhile meshes of our civilization.

—Jean Toomer¹

It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition.

—Jean...