Early White Literature Planted Racism in Us… imo

Let me start off by setting a scene that you’ve probably never fucking thought about:

Purity vs Sin

White Purity vs Black Sin

American literature hasn’t just spun out yarns of heroes and villains – it’s been handing out Holy Color code, and it’s fucking ridiculous. Our culture long ago decided that white equals good, pure, Christly and black equals dirty, evil, demonic, and the Bible helped sell it. READ THAT SHIT ONE MORE TIME. the Bible helped the imagery of White = pure/innocent, and Black = dirty/sin.

Not to be a smartass, but literal historians have said that “the association of white with purity, virtue, and Christ, and black with impurity, evil, and the devil” is baked into Western religion and beliefs. You know it’s true. That Sunday school color theory got twisted into a racist marketing ploy: antebellum preachers even claimed Noah’s son Ham was cursed with black skin. If you have zero religious background, basically what this means is that preachers deadass tried to teach that Ham (the son of Noah… same Noah who built the ark to escape the flood) had a name that in Hebrew, meant “dark or black,” and thus all dark-skinned peoples were divinely doomed to slavery. For some historical context, this is biblical horseshit that plantation owners ran with up to 1865. Basically, if God wore makeup at all, His palette came in only two colors. This “black is the Devil” worldview is so far ingrained into America’s founding stories and aesthetic DNA that it actually gives me a headache: think light-as-angel heroes and dark-as-devil villains in every fucking story.

Let’s get deeper, because I will be giving more examples. I’ll start with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

In early New England fiction the color scheme is painfully literal. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritans live in a black-and-white world straight out of the book of Revelation. The forest is shadowy evil (“the black and dense wood” looms in The Scarlet Letter), and even the sun obeys moral law – little Pearl smartly reminds her mother that “the sun will not shine on the sinful Hester”. (You have to be serious. Hawthorne deadass gives Pearl, A CHILD, supernatural vision to enforce color coding.) Meanwhile, Hester’s tormentor Chillingworth is literally called a “creature of the Black Man” - i.e. the Devil incarnate. In other words, anything black or hidden is evil, and anything light or white is part of God’s crew. White male authors have been subconsciously planting racial discourse in their literature throughout all of history. The Puritans’ spiritual color code PAINFULLY bleeds into their novels: a white sun means innocence and healing, a black cloak or forest means guilt and doom. Hawthorne isn’t even subtle about it: his world paints virtue in whitewash and sin in soot. And he isn’t the only one.

To be or not to be; that is the question

or should I say… To center you literature around race or to not, because THAT is the real question

While I could shittalk Hawthorne forever, I will move on to Shakespeare. YEP. SHAKESPEARE. He hasn’t escaped this color game in U.S. English classrooms either everybody, SHOCKER. English classrooms that focus on teaching a literary canon (which means a collection of really awesome pieces of literature throughout history) that happens to be by ALL WHITE AUTHORS. Again, I’m getting more educational, but American critics have re-read Hamlet through the same old racial lenses that the ALL WHITE AUTHORS saw the world through. The critics have literally said that, contrary to traditional interpretations that dumb down the play, “Hamlet is actually a major race play in which a white prince dressed in black” plays off blackness as criminal energy. Hamlet blames his insane internal conflict and literal pyschotic mental breakdowns on the fact that he is “so white” while claiming that cowardice shows in his pale, passive body, as if being too white made him limp. At the same time he fantasizes about rebranding himself into a black avenger (he wanted to become the “Moor,” also know as Lucianus from the play-within-the-play. Lucianus the “Moor.” FYI, “moor” means “black”). The reason he wanted to do this was because he thought his revenge needed some violence, or grit, or brutal energy. He had to be black to be violent. That is the underlying message here. And yet, we STILL choose to study Hamlet, and say it’s so amazing, and put it in the literary canon.

To keep going, even our literature lectures have picked up the cultural paintbrush: Hamlet’s revenge plot demands action, so Hamlet must “become a ‘Moor’ like Lucianus, or like Claudius, just to be able to kill the king – literally making criminal energy and coding it as black. It is absolutely insane. I honestly think you should exit the blog and look further into Hamlet, but to keep the ball rolling, I will give you some more quick examples.

Toni Morrison (an absolute beast who we LOVE), Fitzgerald (who I dislike), and the Virtue of Whiteness (which is fucked up.)

This racist color scheme is in the canon of “great books", even past the old heads writing plays. For generations, most American writers and critics simply assumed their heroes were white by default, and that “pure white” of snow or lily was the unblemished ideal. Toni Morrison deadass clocked it and pointed out that white writers literally define themselves by blackness. Let me keep going: white identity in the fiction (written by white writers) wouldn’t mean anything without the Black “other” as contrast.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald doesn’t even bother fleshing out Black people as full characters; the Jazz Age plot is obsessively about keeping the white race on top, fearing “intermarriage between black and white” as a threat. People have literally CRITICIZED Gatsby as being “preoccupied with whiteness as a defining feature, [regularly] omitting or marginalizing Black individuals”. Whiteness became the norm of virtue and power, while blackness was background noise. This isn’t an accident and we HAVE to acknowledge it to move past it. The mythos of America’s Golden Age needed a spotless white poster-child (who was literally Daisy), so the real world was edited out in pursuit of racial “purity” in the narrative. It is embarrassing and says a lot about our country. This is shit that we learn in school, watch at home, and subconsciously internalized every single day.

Modern Takes

These days there are a ton of writers and scholars that are calling bullshit on old racial discourse and all that secretly racist bullshit. Toni Morrison herself drilled into the canon, showing how freedom, manhood, and even innocence in America’s literature were written only against a “shadow” of blackness. How have we never seen it before? Critics now read the same texts and see the lazy color-coding: white heroines always mean pure, black environments or villains always mean evil. Even kids’ stories and poems reflect this shit: who plays the angel? Usually a white kid. Who’s the witch or dirty orphan? Usually dark-skinned or ragged. By pointing it out, we can see this coloring as a choice, not a fact. Once you’re done reading this, go read Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. I am so serious. She explains how “blackness” in white-authored stories simply help shore up a white identity. Even though progress is slow, our newer literary canon is waking up to the fact that “the only ‘color-blind’ standard in most old American literature was white”. The sun can shine on anyone – BUT ONLY IF WE stop taking racial fairy tales at face value and start painting stories that recognize every hue.

Thanks for reading. I hope I taught you something. Also, I think you deserve to die if you are racist. It’s 2025. Grow up.