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Racism In Toni Morrison's God Help The Child

2637 Words11 Pages

Recurrent racism, its social impacts, is a central theme of immigrant writing that creates many landscapes in contemporary literature. The immigrant writer takes an opportunity to attack and tackle racism and its consequence from different angles – religious, cultural and historical. The writer does not randomly preoccupy with and write about her/his intricate experience in the new land, but explicitly unfold his/her race/gender experience with its ups and downs. This type of writing has created a new understanding of theories such as racism/gender/ethnic/counter-narrative and post colonial studies among many others. This alternative genre is maneuvered by political, psychological, social and cultural processes of power that is influential to its construction.
Various multiple meanings and definitions are located for racism, its relevance, to contemporary situation reflects the work of …show more content…

God Help the Child opens with an abrupt beginning of defiance and self-identification. The novel starts with the voice of the mother, Sweetness, saying: “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened” (3). She discloses from the beginning a big dispute that happened between her and her husband because of the colour of the child, Lula Bride, that is not in her hands and cannot be individually controlled. In God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s emphasis on colourism creates a strong voice to Sweetness, a woman recounting herself as “light-skinned with good hair, what we call high yellow”. From the very beginning, Sweetness describes her depressed situation expecting the future victimization of her baby. She says, “It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese

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