William Faulkner on Racism

Until 1863, slavery was a large institution, even an industry, in the American southern states, tracing back to the 1600’s. After the abolition of slavery, African Americans did not become integrated into society; they didn’t even have close to the equal rights of white citizens. With the integration of African Americans came a sense of racism from people in the southern states, despite them gradually having more rights as time progressed. Racism, by definition, is the unjustly wrong treatment and judgement of people based upon one’s skin color without previous knowledge of the person.

After the Civil War, the war that essentially fought against slavery in the United States, segregation and racism was still in use, and wasn’t seen as too much of a deal to most of the people in the south. The institution of the Jim Crow laws had “enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s” (Urofsky).

Racism and segregation against people of color had become even more prominent. Even up until the 1950’s and 1960’s, racism was still a great issue in America. In between this time period of the Jim Crow laws, William Faulkner had been writing books and novels that had been able to show the impurities of racism, prejudice, and segregation in the south.

Absalom, Absalom!

Having been born and raised in the south, and spending a large amount of his adult life in the south, Faulkner had been used to this norm as a way of life, and finally found that the racism was a plaguing problem that divided the country.

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This is shown in Faulkner’s book, Absalom, Absalom!. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel that is based upon a southern man named Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen arrives in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1833 with a crew of slaves, and buys a one hundred acre farm that he uses as a cotton plantation. Sutpen finds a woman, marries her, and has one son and one daughter: Henry and Judith. Henry goes to the college of Mississippi, where he meets a fellow college student named Bon. Henry brings Bon back to the Sutpen household for Christmas, where Bon and Judith meet, and eventually become engaged.

Racism in the Book

When Sutpen finds out, he enforces that Bon and Judith cannot become married. Sutpen had been married previously to another woman, and they had birthed Bon, but Sutpen left due to learning of the information that his wife had been part African American, making Judith and Bon siblings. Henry had refused to believe this as true, however he was unaware that Bon was part African American. Henry later learns from Sutpen that Bon is in fact African American, and his half-brother. The part that is revolting to Henry is not the idea about Bon’s incest to his family; it’s about the fact that Bon is part African American. In Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner institutes the ridiculous ideology of racism in his story, and uses an impactful way of blatantly showing it. To begin with, Sutpen had found a woman, a woman who he may have anticipated being his soulmate, or at least worthy enough of a person to have a child with her, to say the least. But when he found out that his wife was part African American, and his son being part African American, he refused to accept them as family.

Faulkner had exposed the idea that people hated and despised people of other races, especially African Americans, so much that anyone that had African American ancestry was despised, even if people weren’t African American themselves. Secondly, to the great majority of people, a child, especially a first child, is a great deal to a family. However though, due to Sutpen’s wife and son being part African American and his extreme racism, he was easily willing to abandon them. His only son and presumably the love of his wife had been left to live without a father and a husband, completely separating and ruining his family. It truly shows Sutpen’s racism, as some people are incapable of having a family, but he so easily gave it up over the issue of race. This led to extreme bitterness on the side of Bon’s mother, who eventually burnt down the house that they had lived in prior to the separation. Lastly, Henry, when told that Bon was part African American, had not cared that Bon had attempted to have a marriage with Henry’s sister and his own half sister; he only cared that he was of African American descent. In recent decades and even in our society today, there is often a stereotype that people from the south tend to have intimate relationships with close relatives. In Faulkner’s life span, this stereotype was either still relatively similar as it is today, or it was seen as true, and not just a stereotype.

No matter the case, Faulkner used this to his advantage in the novel. By showing to the reader that a man does not care as much about incest but cares more about being half-brothers with a man that has African American heritage, it displays that the people of the south in this time period had an unjust hatred for people that looked differently. They had seemed to care less about bigger issues, whether they would be about employment, the economy, the world wars, or family issues. This also shows Faulkner’s rebellion against the standards of high southern society. Most of the upper class in southern states were built around slavery, racism, and the exploitation of others. This not only includes the use of segregation against African Americans, but also the poor. This creates the situation that there are fewer people capable of competition against the already wealthy, whether it be farming or the distribution of goods. In this process, it will become easier for the rich to stay rich and acquire more wealth, and harder for the poor to escape the devastating loop of poverty.