In my home country of Panama, the color of your skin has little to do with how natives will judge you. Since most citizens are a menagerie of every color of skin imaginable, none of the racial stereotypes hold true. Instead, class and familial status are where all judgement and discrimination comes from. Similarly, in \u201cThe Expendable Man\u201d, Dorothy B. Hughes is trying to highlight the importance of class in a society obsessed with the racial binary. She takes the racial hierarchy of color and inverts them in terms of class. Hugh is a successful man, on the cusp of becoming a research doctor, while Iris is a poor white girl with no prospects and an unwanted pregnancy. This difference between Hugh and Iris is revealed to have heightened importance because Hughes is so ambiguous about their race and the color of their skin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In class, we talked about how many of us did not even realize that Hugh and his family were black until a couple chapters in. All we knew about him was of his success and the comfort of his family being able to support him in his medical endeavors. Conversely, Iris is described as a dirty young girl, with no respect and no prospects in her life. They have many stark differences that go way beyond the color of their skin, which serves to emphasize another, less obvious, facet of discrimination in the American society: the distinction of class. This secondary discrimination in society works in conjunction with the racial discrimination to create a complex web of stereotypes being perpetuated throughout American history. Hugh, being the compassionate person he is, stops to help this young girl obviously in need. Unfortunately, she throws him into a situation that is much more than he bargained for. The color of her skin puts him into a distorted power dynamic, not being able to refuse her at the border because of the white patrolmen watching, but Hugh is able to exercise his own class power over her in the privacy of his home. She thinks she can use him for an abortion, but being the respectable man he is, and being of a much higher class than her, he can afford to refuse such an absurd request. But in highlighting this, Hughes is posing the question of how these differences interplay with one another in society. It will be interesting to see which one wins out in the grapple for power. The officers are unconvinced that the black man did not take advantage of this vulnerable little girl, but he garners more power than a lower class black man, with connections to many more powerful people. The policemen with their racial biases can only go so far, but then again, class may only go so far for a black man in the segregated world. Which one wins?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my home country of Panama, the color of your skin has little to do with how natives will judge you. Since most citizens are a menagerie of every color of skin imaginable, none of the racial stereotypes hold true. Instead, class and familial status are where all judgement and discrimination comes from. Similarly, in … Continue reading “Class Clowns or Class Crowns?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blacknoir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}