Structural and Reverse Racism in Morrison’s God Help the Child: A Black Feminist and Psychoanalytic Reading

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 MA in English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran

2 Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract

In God Help the Child (2015), the overarching argument of this article is that Sweetness is incapable of conveying a meaningful reflection of her “true self”. Her frailty to love and respect herself makes her vulnerable to exchange the same emotions with Bride. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the impact of colorism and color-blindness on the lives of African-American women. We try to respond to two fundamental questions, namely how can “looking-glass-self” theory be applied on the maternal bond between Sweetness and Bride? and second, what is the impact of intersectionality or matrix of the social domination on the lives of Sweetness and Bride in God Help the Child (2015)? Drawing upon Collins’s Black Feminist and Winnicott’s Psychoanalytic theories, we try to examine multi-faceted aspects of racism, including reverse racism, structural racism, intersectionality, matrix of the social domination, and common stereotypical images attributed to Black women with a holistic approach. Although socio-cultural White ideology is dominant to Bride’s Blackness, Bride rescues herself from the hatred of her own world by furnishing a kind of domination over other women and companies by her physical beauty and success in expanding cosmetics business. She turns her dark skin color into a marvelous asset in the guise of the White clothing.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Ansell, Amy E. Race and Ethnicity: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2013.
Bobo, Lawrence, et al. “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology.” Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin, editors. Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change. Praeger Publishers, 1997.
Cabrera, Nolan L. White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of Post-Racial Higher Education. Rutgers UP, 2018.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. U of California P, 1978.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 1990.
Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order. Scribner’s Sons, 1902.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, editor. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New Press, 1996.
Fairbairn, Ronald. An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality. Basic Books, 1952.
Ghasemi, Parvin. “Negotiating Black Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” CLA Journal, vol. 53, no. 3, 2010, pp. 235-253. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44325640.
Goodman, Simon, and Lottie Rowe. “Maybe it is Prejudice … but it is NOT Racism: Negotiating Racism in Discussion Forums about Gypsies.” Discourse & Society, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 32-46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24441578.
Hall, Christine Iijima. “Beauty is in the Soul of the Beholder: Psychological Implications of Beauty and African American Women.” Cultural Diversity and Mental Health, vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 125-137.
Houseman, Alfred Edward. “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.” A Shropshire Lad: LXII. Random House, 1896.
Johnsi. A. “Comprehending the Impact of Maternal Influence in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.” Impact Journals, vol. 6, no. 4, 2018, pp. 81-87.
Lincoln, Bruce. “The Rape of Persephone: A Greek Scenario of Women’s Initiation.” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 72, no. 3/4, 1979, pp. 223-235. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509722.
Maugham, Somerset. “The Man with the Scar.” Collected Short Stories of Somerset Maugham, vol. 2, Random House, 1925.
Mehrvand, Ahad. “Jim Crowism: The Catalyst for Bigger Thomas’s Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.” The Icfai University Journal of English Studies, vol. IV, nos. 3-4, 2009, pp. 78-89.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and The Colonized. Earthscan, 2003.
Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
---. Beloved. Vintage Books, 1987.
---. God Help the Child. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Pierce, Jennifer. Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action. Stanford UP, 2012.
Pourkazem, Farnam, and Ahad Mehrvand. “The Agency of the Colonized People in Toni Morrison’s Later Works.” 2020. Azarbaijan Shahid Madani U, Master’s thesis.
Roberts, Dorothy. “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.” Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Demeter Press, 2007, pp. 482-499. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1rrd94h.31.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Random House, 1997.
Sanderson, Jimmy. “Weighing in on the Coaching Decision: Discussing Sports and Race Online.” From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line, edited by Chris Lamb, U of Nebraska P, 2016, pp. 555-581. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1d9nhwr.24.
Winnicott, Donald. “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 41, 1960, pp. 585-595.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. Grosset & Dunlap, 1940.
Zare Zadeh, Ali, and Ahad Mehrvand. “Ambivalent Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and God Help the Child: A Psychoanalytic and Black Feminist Reading.” 2022. Azarbaijan Shahid Madani U, Master’s thesis.

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 02 October 2024
  • Revise Date: 28 December 2024
  • Accept Date: 07 February 2025

Share

How to cite

Statistics