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Racism In The Color Purple By Alice Walker

1464 Words6 Pages

Racism was officially abolished after the civil war, however, owing to the fact that certain notions pertaining to their respective races were so deeply embedded and that the grip of such pre-conceived notions was much stronger in the societies of Africa, racism continued to exist though in passive and implicit forms. In order to put an end to racism a lot of Afro-american writers, maintaining an abolitionist stance, resorted to a sort of writing which projected society the way it actually was and attempted to bring into limelight the issues which persisted within. Alice Walker belonged to this league of writers. In her novel, “The color purple”, she employs racism as one of the major themes that the plot heralds. We see several instances of racism in her novel. The fact that Alice Walker 's ' The color purple ' is set against the backdrop of rural Georgia, an American state where the protagonists and the linked characters belonging to the Afro-american community have for themselves separate church, grocery store, residential colonies etc while their American counterparts especially New York experience great economic prosperity and a rather indiscriminatory social environment speaks volumes of the level of access the afro-american states of the USA had to symbolic societal rewards and a peaceful and stable social environment. The comparison between the blacks and the whites is captured more on a community level than an individual level since not every character in the book

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