Separate and Unequal

The parker called them and their children names (“Pickaninnies free!”)  but the food on his vest and holes in his pants rendered it fairly harmless. In any case it was a small price to pay for the fun they might not ever have again. Two pennies and an insult were well spent if it meant seeing the spectacle of whitefolks making a spectacle of themselves. So, although the carnival was a lot less than mediocre (which is why it agreed to a Colored Thursday), it gave the four hundred black people in its audience thrill upon thrill upon thrill. (58)

This passage on page fifty eight describes the carnival Paul D. managed to convince Sethe and Denver to come with him to, and the atmosphere at the carnival. Throughout the passage there are several examples of racially heated language that, considering the period in time, would not have stood out in conversation. When Sethe describes “seeing the spectacle of whitefolks” the language implies not only a strong feeling of separation, but also the sense that the only people who were meant to be ridiculous at the time were African Americans. Given the estimated time of roughly 1885, it is unsurprising to think that White oppression was in the middle of its decline after much of the violence perpetrated by groups such as the KKK was classified as a federal offense. This is not to say that these groups did not still have sizable influence in the area, at one point Sethe even states that they lived in “territory infected with the Klan”, which only stresses how astonishing it must have been for Sethe and Paul D. to see a group of white people act ridiculous for their entertainment. The carnival flipped many of the darkest southern traditions on their head by completely switching the power role, from white slave owners to the former slaves.

The passage also emanates this feeling of second class citizenship that was ordinary at the time when it talks about how the carnival only agreed to let African Americans come to the carnival because it was so low quality very few white people would come. Although the fourteenth amendment had been passed roughly twelve years earlier, the law only protected African Americans with the “equal protection under the law”, at the same time the premise of separate but equal was in effect. This meant that white people did not have to share similar spaces to African Americans because African Americans were offered a separate “equivalent” which allowed racism to exist under the fourteenth amendment. This policy was upheld by the supreme court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, it wasn’t until Brown v. Board in 1954 that the doctrine of separate but equal was overruled by a court of law.

This passage highlights the unspoken racial boundaries of the times that determined who could go where, do what, or talk to whom. These boundaries were the remnants of a nearly two hundred and fifty year old system of slavery and publicly accepted mistreatment of an entire race of people. Beloved, as an text works to show these remnants in ways that strike its current audience as absurd, but which would have been standard in the time it is set.