Literary historians or biographers who stay interested in a particular author drift in opposite directions. Some, jaded or disillusioned, fixate on that author's personal and even artistic flaws, eventually sounding as if they could have done the primary works better themselves. Others keep getting more and more tolerant toward their vulnerably human subject, often ending up as protective. I would be delighted if pinpoint scholarship could prove that Mark Twain was an avatar of antiracism. But I hope for too much. Throughout his career Twain could aim some stereotyping invective and belittling humor at several groups, most notably the Chinese, the Irish, and American Indians while, like his educated contemporaries, applying labels of race and nationality both casually and interchangeably. So, to narrow down, I would be delighted if Twain emerged – intellectually, emotionally, and politically – as a champion of African Americans or, better still, as a humanist who essentially considered them his peers by birth rather than pitiable victims of bias and social injustice. Not incidentally, I may be making two unforgivable mistakes by narrowing down to Twain's attitudes about African Americans. First, any posing of the matter in that binary way accepts race as a scientifically definable entity in effect or, to use currentspeak, reifies race as a concrete reality. Second, posing the matter in terms of black versus white forgets the much broader process in the United States during much of Twain's lifetime when the privileging label of white was often denied to many nationalities from Eastern Europe and the Middle East and – most egregiously – to the Japanese and Chinese. We ponder too little the fact that Samuel L. Clemens was made inescapably conscious that his determinable ancestors on both sides rated clearly as Anglo-Saxon, the self-proclaimed highest, only unimpeachable level of whiteness.