As the book is set in 1830, the 11-year-old protagonist, Wash, faces racism both when he is enslaved on a plantation in Barbados and when he later escapes to places like Nova Scotia and London. On the plantation, Wash and other enslaved people are treated as less than human, beaten, and killed for no reason. Yet even when Wash escapes slavery with the help of an abolitionist white man named Titch, Wash realizes that Titch and the other white abolitionists do not truly view him as their equal—they still see him as a person to be saved, condescending to him as a lesser person. Other characters in the novel, such as Tanna (a mixed-race woman) and the Esquimaux people in the Arctic, are similarly treated as lesser than white people. In this way, the book shows that racism doesn’t only manifest in overt cruelty, as is the case on the plantations; racism also manifests in white people treating non-white people in subtler ways that still dehumanize and belittle them.
Wash observes how the cruelty on the plantation is based on the racist idea that enslaved people are subhuman, and how the white masters use this idea to justify dehumanizing treatment. When Wash is 11, a new master arrives on the plantation, Erasmus Wilde, who is exceptionally cruel. At dinner one evening, Wash hears Erasmus describe the enslaved people to his brother, Titch: “They are not the help, Titch. They are the furniture.” This is the root of Erasmus’s brutal treatment of the people he enslaves: that he believes them to be no better than objects. Erasmus’s belief in enslaved people’s lack of humanity then justifies his abuse: when another enslaved woman, Big Kit, takes too long to clean up a stain Erasmus made, he smashes her in the face with a plate. Though Titch tries to help Big Kit, Erasmus tells Titch to leave it and not to make a mess of himself. Erasmus’s belief in their inhumanity—exemplified by the idea that helping Big Kit is not worth Titch staining his napkin with her blood—clearly enables him to treat enslaved people with complete disregard for their humanity. When Erasmus arrives on the plantation, Wash describes how Erasmus and the overseers start maiming the enslaved people; cutting out tongues; burning them alive; whipping, hanging, and shooting them to death. Thus, this belief that the enslaved people are lesser goes further than Erasmus. The white overseers use the same racist beliefs to perpetuate massive injustice.
Yet even those who try to see enslaved people as human beings worthy of equality still have a tendency to condescend to Wash, illustrating how racism can also manifest in subtle beliefs that he is still less than white or mixed-race people. Titch is the first person who treats Wash like a human being, and he helps foster Wash’s scientific, artistic, and reading abilities. He tells Wash that he believes the enslaved people are God’s creatures also, who are owed rights and freedoms. But he goes on, saying that “If anything will keep white men from their heaven, it is [slavery].” Hearing this, Wash realizes that Titch is more concerned with white people’s own salvation than in truly valuing the enslaved people’s lives. Titch helps Wash escape slavery, but he later abandons Wash in the Arctic. Towards the end of the book, Wash realizes that if Titch truly thought of Wash as an equal, he would never have discarded Wash so casually. Wash thinks, “To [Titch], perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.” In this way, Wash illustrates how Titch only views Wash in terms of what Wash can do for him—reinforcing the racist belief that Wash doesn’t have true value or require respect as a person. Tanna, a mixed-race English woman whom Wash meets in Canada, also sometimes reinforces these stereotypes as well. Even though she respects and loves Wash, when she realizes that he used to be enslaved and doesn’t read well, she suggests that she could teach him. Wash notes, “in her suggestion there seemed to be a belittlement, a setting herself above, as if my being unlettered defined my agency and character.” Wash recognizes that her suggestion sets herself up as a superior person, despite the fact that Wash’s character and agency should not be tied to his ability to read.
Other characters like Tanna and the Esquimaux people experience the same treatment, showing how racism affects all people of color (not just enslaved Black people like Wash), because they, too, face the same biased belief that they are less than white people. Though Tanna sometimes condescends to Wash, she also experiences racism herself. Her mother was born on the Solomon Islands, and as her father, Goff, notes, Tanna was never fully accepted into English society because of this. When Tanna and Wash visit Mrs. Wilde at her estate in Granbourne, Mrs. Wilde is cold to them and doesn’t offer them lunch because she didn’t know if they would like English food, though Tanna points out that she is English. This is one example of how society uses Tanna’s race to justify lesser treatment—to not offer common courtesy because of her race. Wash finds Mr. Wilde treating the Esquimaux people the same way, when Wash and Titch visit him in the Arctic. Titch criticizes him for not learning the Esquimaux language or history despite working in the Arctic for decades, with the clear implication that Mr. Wilde believes they are not worth his time or understanding. However, Titch also makes the mistake of calling one of them Mr. Wilde’s manservant, assuming that he is there for Mr. Wilde’s needs. While Erasmus and the other overseers’ treatment is clearly racist and dehumanizing, the book illustrates that all of the white characters share racial bias because they imply that the characters of color are lesser than they are.
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Racism, Humanity, and Cruelty Quotes in Washington Black
We had lived in blood for years, my entire life. But something about that evening—the gleaming beauty of the master’s house, the refinements, the lazy elegance—made me feel a profound, unsettling sense of despair. It was not only William’s mutilation that day, knowing his head stared out over the fields even now, in the darkness. What I felt at that moment, though I then lacked the language for it, was the raw, violent injustice of it all.
And as I began to draw what I saw with a clean accuracy, I realized I was troubled by the enormous beauty of that place, of the jewel-like fields below us, littered as I knew them to be with broken teeth. The hot wind snapped at my papers, and in a kind of ghostly sound beneath this I thought I heard the cry of a baby. For the few women who gave birth here were turned immediately back into the fields, and they would set their tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun. I craned out at the fields; I could see nothing. Far out at sea, a great flock of seagulls rose and turned, the late afternoon light flaring on the undersides of their wings.
Titch explained we would be entering Chesapeake Bay, and would therefore soon be leaving the ship. We would also, however, find ourselves subject to the laws of American freedom. “Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to different people,” he said, as though I did not know the truth of this better than he.
It had happened so gradually, but these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I’d been born for a higher purpose, to draw the earth’s bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only—I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered.
“It was I who had failed in my understanding, you see. Life holds a sanctity for them we can scarcely begin to imagine; it therefore struck them as absurd that someone would choose to end it. A great ludicrous act. In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values—the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman—they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.”
I thought it wonderful for a man of science to speak so. Staring at his bright chewing face, I realized how profoundly I liked him.
For years she had ignored me, until I had turned up suddenly in her hut, and then with a ferocity that terrified she’d fought off all who would cause me harm. She had cared for me and cursed me and cracked my ribs and clutched me so tight in her love that I thought she might break them again. She’d damned my father as cruel and my mother as foolish, and when I said she could know nothing of their natures she struck me hard in the face. […] She told me I was born of stupidity, that it must be blood-deep, and also that I was brilliant, that there would never again be a mind like mine. She loved me with a viciousness that kept me from ever feeling complacent, with the reminder that nothing was permanent, that we would one day be lost to each other, She loved me with the terror of separation, as someone who had lost all the riches of a scorched life. She loved me in spite of those past losses, as if to say, I will not surrender this time, you will not take this from me.
How could he have treated me so, he who congratulated himself on his belief that I was his equal? I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.
Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true. […]
Again he shook his head. “I treated you as family.”
How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. He had saved my very flesh, taken me away from certain death. His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.
