In 1900 the African American writer Charles Chesnutt published an essay called “The Future American” in which he described how the American nation would develop in the twentieth century. A light-skinned mulatto, Chesnutt was preoccupied with the cultural meaning of skin color and the legal definitions of whiteness, blackness, and the in-between group of mixed-race individuals. He argued that this group was in a unique position to experience the problem of the color line, and it served as an implicit reference point for his utopian vision of a post-racial society. As he put it, “it ought to be quite clear that the future American race – the future American ethnic type – will be formed of a mingling, in a yet to be ascertained proportion, of the various racial varieties which make up the present population of the United States […].”

In this process of mingling, which Chesnutt went on to sketch for a number of generations, no perceptible traces of black would be left: “There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals.” Chesnutt's concept of the “post-racial” envisioned a society in which the mingling and mixing of races would eventually lead to the dissolution of race classifications – which he saw as scientifically dubious in the first place. Crucially, since the mingling would change the skin color of the future American ethnic type, his argument made skin color the decisive visual marker of difference. Yet, expressing the bias of his time, Chesnutt's concept put blackness at the bottom and whiteness at the top. He proposed a notion of middle-class-ness as well as a form of respectability that was built on the cultural hierarchy of skin color types.

As Chesnutt's essay showed, the mulatto or mixed-race perspective offered a unique point of view from which to discuss the effects of skin color. Depending on the observer's position, skin color was perceived as a source of shame, a source of guilt, or a source of pride. Yet these connotations also created a dilemma: a lighter skin color was presented as desirable as a signifier of upward social mobility and cultural capital, but as a marker of identity it made a clear sense of racial belonging more difficult.