"Passing" and "impersonation" may sound like quaint terms of a bygone era, but they continue to inform the way we read. There is an assumption that we could fill a room with the world's great literature, train a Martian to analyze these books, and then expect that Martian to categorize each by the citizenship or ethnicity or gender of its author. Feather's blindfold test is one that literary critics would do well to ponder, for the belief that we can "read" a person's racial or ethnic identity from his or her writing runs surprisingly deep. More than half the time, Eldridge guessed wrong. Feather duly dropped the needle onto a variety of record albums whose titles and soloists were concealed from the trumpeter. IT'S a perennial question: Can you really tell? The great black jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge once made a wager with the critic Leonard Feather that he could distinguish white musicians from black ones - blindfolded.
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