At one point in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, the narrator, in reference to Miller and Burns, tells us “Looking at these two men with the American eye, the differences would perhaps be the more striking” (32). What does the “American eye” see when it looks at these two men, and what does the novel imagine as the problem or injustice seeing this way produces? What kinds of differences does the novel consider less “arbitrary” (39)? How might we read the novel’s familial drama—its form—as an imagined solution to the problem of the “American eye”? What kinds of problems does this solution entail, and how might we read it in light of Karen and Barbara Field’s notion of “racecraft”?