SOURCE: Boeckmann, Cathy. “Thomas Dixon and the Rhetorical Mulatto.” In her A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912, pp. 63-97. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

In the following chapter from her book on American fictional representations of the nature of blackness in the nineteenth century, Boeckmann asserts that, in The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, Dixon uses the outer appearance of African Americans in a negative way to symbolize alleged inherent character traits.

At the start of book two of the white supremacist novel The Clansman, Thomas Dixon introduces the character Silas Lynch, a politician modeled on Frederick Douglass. Though Lynch is a mulatto who has “acquired the full physical characteristics of the Aryan race,” the narrator notes that “his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle. It was impossible to look at his...