"The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
-Walter Kirn, Time
Racial allegories are stories with deeper meanings that are directly and sometimes indirectly associated with race. The Intuitionist is a racial allegory along with the texts that Kirn mentions in the above quote. All of these texts focus on the hardships of people that are not of the dominant race. These texts follow the lives of such people and how they overcome prejudice and racism to make their own places in the world. Both of the texts above are great supplementary material to Whitehead’s novel. Unfortunately, I have not read either of the texts, but with the brief summaries of them, I can tell that they truly portray the direct association with race that I mentioned above.
While researching racial allegories for this post I came across an interesting site that considers the Harry Potter series a racial allegory. Being a fan of the serious and having read it several times, I found this label interesting. J.K. Rowling does a good job with creating a world where race has no importance, but this site expressed how Rowling uses blood lineage and species in a similar way that Whitehead, Morrison, and Ellison use race. In the Harry Potter series the main problem is a war for equality among the magical and the non-magical, humans and creatures, and creatures and creatures. Essentially, they are fighting to establish and maintain “world peace.” They want to rid the world of darkness—dark magic and quite possibly the inherent dark side of mankind. The whole series establishes an argument for equality. Half-bloods are just as “good” as pure-bloods. Two of the main characters, Lord Voldemort (the antagonist) and Harry Potter (the protagonist) have muggle blood in their family bloodlines. Women are offered equality in both job opportunities, pay, and respect. Hermione Granger (another main character) is one of the most valued educational minds of her generation. Without her, Harry would not have succeeded in any of his many adventures at Hogwarts. While these books do not directly deal with race, Rowling did not completely leave out the idea of prejudice. She established a sense of equality while simultaneously questioning the equality of impure bloodlines and “lesser” species. I didn’t think Harry Potter was a racial allegory, but it is. It just deals with race in a more indirect and symbolic way.
Can you think of any other novel that may fall into the category of racial allegory? Does it have a direct or an indirect association with race? What qualifies it as a racial allegory?
Written By: Elizabeth Willbanks
This is a pretty old film, but some may be familiar enough with it to see the allegory... When the original film "The Planet of the Apes" was first released in 1968 (a time period filled with racial tension among whites and blacks), many people considered it to be a racial allegory. When the film was released, the black community was understandably distraught over the film. The movie features no black people "in the future." Oh, and there are no Latinos or Asians either. Every one of the future humans - the ones who were "better adapted and survived" - are white. The apes in the film have names, but they also have something else: A racial hierarchy. The blonde-haired orangutans are at the top, ruling the roost. Next in line are the chimpanzees, depicted in the films as having brown hair and light-skinned faces. At the bottom are the gorillas, who have black hair and - yes, you guessed right - black-skinned faces... pretty crazy for something that always considered just a geeky sci-fi movie.
ReplyDeleteCheck out Isaac Asimov's Robot Series. It is about a future detective that is partnered with a robot (gasp!). Robots on Earth are treated with prejudice and even referred to as 'boy'. So it isn't hard to see the similarities.
ReplyDeleteThere are also similarities between the 'human' races. The Spacers look down on the Earthmen as inferior and dirty. They won't touch them and rarely even go near them, but they dominate and control them by confining them to Earth so they won't spread their 'kind' to other worlds.
Anyway, it is an excellent series by one of Sci-Fi's greats and I suggest reading it.
- Japheth