Whiteness and the Measurement of Racism
Can we think of racists as more or less racist?
The Scenario
In Yaa Gyasi’s novel, Homegoing, one of her characters is a white man who deals enslaved African people. There is no doubt this man shares the racist ideas of the modern world. He is a racist. Yaa Gyasi tells us that this man, James, rules over a castle where enslaved Africans are kept in horrible and inhuman conditions in its dungeons before being sent as slaves to America. At the same time, the author tells us that the same man marries an African woman, shares a bed with her and has a kid with her.
We would think of her as a wife, but that is not the word. The word is wench, not wife, because a black woman, like Effi, cannot be considered a true wife in that setting. The true wife of James lies in England, even though the character never sees her. Gyasi is pointing to the historical feature that was built within the modern world that black women have a hard time when it comes to relationships because of their skin color. They are seen as less human by their white and black counterparts that see in the whiteness of white women the ideal of beauty.
James married her in order to make an alliance with Africans who traded enslaved people with the Europeans. A hard fact: the trade worked because some…
