What Shakespeare can teach us about racism

William Shakespeare's famous tragedy “Othello“ is often the first piece that comes to mind when you think of it Shakespeare and race. And if not “Othello,” then people normally call “The Merchant of Venice“”Antony and Cleopatra“”The storm” or his first – and bloodiest – tragedy, “Titus Andronicus“, my favorite Shakespeare play.

Among Shakespeare scholars, these five works are often known as his traditionally understood “racial plays” and include characters who’re black like Othello, Jewish like Shylock, indigenous like Caliban, or black African like Cleopatra.

But what did Shakespeare say about race in plays like “hamlet” And “Macbeth“Where, for instance, black characters don’t play a dominant role?

As Shakespeare scholars who study race know: all of his pieces address race in any way. How could they not?

After all, every one has a racial identity, just as every living person breathes. In other words, every character that Shakespeare gave life to has a racial identity hamlet To Hippolyta.

The playwright wrote within the late fifteenth and early Sixteenth centuries about many key topics relevant today, including gender, addiction, sexuality, mental health, social psychology, sexual violenceAnti-Semitism, sexism and naturally race.

In my book “Shakespeare's White Others,” I Explore interracial divisions that Shakespeare exemplifies in all his plays.

Here are 4 things you need to find out about Shakespeare and race.

1. No one should fear Shakespeare

For an extended time, I used to be afraid by Shakespeare. I'm not the just one.

In his 1964 essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare“, James Baldwin described his initial resistance. Like many individuals today, Baldwin wrote that he was “a victim of that loveless education which makes so many schoolboys detest Shakespeare.”

Much of Baldwin's disgust for Shakespeare had nothing to do with the English author specifically, but relatively with the white elitism that surrounded his work and literature.

But as Baldwin eventually realized, Shakespeare was not the “creator of his oppression.”

Just as Shakespeare didn’t create misogyny and sexism, he also didn’t create race and racism. Rather, he observed the complex realities of the world around him and articulated in his pieces an underlying hope for a more just world.

2. Shakespeare's work reveals social injustice

“Titus Andronicus“Aaron” featured the playwright’s first black character. In this play, written towards the tip of the Sixteenth century, the white Roman empress Tamora cheats on her white emperor husband Saturninus with Aaron. When Tamora finally gives birth, it is obvious that Tamora's baby daddy shouldn’t be Saturninus.

Consequently, the white characters, knowing concerning the infant's true father, urge Aaron to kill his newborn black son. But Aaron refuses. Instead, he decides to guard his beloved child fiercely.

In the midst of all of the drama unfolding across the child's existence, Shakespeare offers a phenomenal defense of blackness for a moment within the fourth act of the play.

“Is black such a lowly color?” Aaron asks first, before questioning the cultural norm. “Charcoal black is better than another shade in that it disdains wearing another shade.”

In other words, at the very least for Aaron, being black was nice, and black exuded strength.

Such words about black identity should not uttered anywhere else in Shakespeare's plays – not even the higher known plays Othello.

3. The power of whiteness

In pieces like “hamlet“, “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet“Race still plays a job within the drama, even when there aren’t any dominant black characters.

Shakespeare does this by illustrating the creation and maintenance of white identity. In a way, Shakespeare describes the nuances of race through the racial similarities of his characters, thus making racial whiteness clearly visible.

In Shakespeare's time, the perceived superiority of whiteness meant social status, very similar to today negotiated by everyone based on the standards of the dominant culture.

For example, in several of his plays, the playwright uses “white hands” as noble symbols of purity and white supremacy. He also drew attention to his characters' race by describing them as “white” or “fair.”

Shakespeare also used black as a metaphor for taint.

Such a moment occurs within the comedy “A whole lot of noise about nothing.”

A young white woman, Hero, is falsely accused of cheating on her fiancé. On her wedding day, Hero's groom Claudio accuses her of infidelity. Claudio and Hero's father Leonato then shame Hero for his supposed unchastity, a taboo for Sixteenth-century English women who were legally the property of her father after which her husband.

Because Hero's sexual purity is supposedly compromised, her father describes her as having “fallen into an inkwell.”

Sex before marriage violated the male-dominated culture's expectations of single white women.

So on this piece, Hero temporarily represents a “colored” white woman – or a symbolic reflection of the stereotypical, hypersexual black woman.

4. The Future of Shakespeare and Race Studies

Today, scholars are publishing recent insights into the social, cultural, and political problems with Shakespeare's time and ours. In fact, dozens of students and theater practitioners are dedicated to her topic professional life to explore race in Shakespeare's literature and time.

In his 2000 book “Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Revisions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice“UCLA English professor Arthur L. Little Jr. explored British imperialism, racialized whiteness, and sexual myths about black men.

In 2020, playwright Anchuli Felicia King wrote: “Keene“, a satirical tackle “Othello” that provides a contemporary critique of whiteness. “Keene” stars Kai, a Japanese musicologist, and Tyler, a black Ph.D. College student, Meet at a Shakespeare conference where they’re the one two people of color on the elite white gathering. While Tyler focuses on writing his thesis, Kai focuses on Tyler. Romance ensues, only to see Tyler, very similar to Othello before him, betrayed by his secret white confidant Ian.

In 2019 British actress Adjoa Andoh directed Shakespeare's “Richard II“with a cast of all women of color – a production that she called “a thought experiment on the universality of humanity.”