Victorian Racism vs. Today's Racism

My original plan for this blog post was to write about one of the excerpts that I enjoyed reading for the pleasantness of the story and descriptions like Macdonald’s “By Car and Cowcatcher” or Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife.” However, after our class discussion in class today, I would like to focus in on a very different sort of passage that made me shudder as I read. The excerpt from William Makepeace Thackeray’s letters to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth let us peak into a very common view of race in the Victorian era.

As we read in many of the excerpts in this Contexts section, many Victorians—Dickens, Mayhew, Carlyle, Wentworth—felt a sense of superiority to other races. At this time, the country was used to its success as an empire stretching across the globe, exploiting both the goods and people of far away places. English society was so used to its accomplishment in taking over these cultures and peoples they began to see themselves as stronger and infinitely advanced. Thackeray’s sentence of how black people have very different “…capacities for thought, pleasure, endurance…” to his own perfectly captures the common feelings Victorians held (1023). Thackeray and his fellow countrymen thought these other races to be incapable of being as intelligent, having unalike enjoyments and being physically dissimilar than the white race. He even goes as far as to say that whites and blacks are two separate species by comparing the two as asses to horses (1023). Not only did the British share these sentiments, but it was also completely acceptable to publically vocalize or publish these racist, demeaning comments. Given the amount of shockingly plain, horrible racist pieces in this small section of a limited number of excerpts, we can see that racism was not under the politically incorrect category as it is today.

Given that this excerpt were private letters and were not intended to be published and available for the public, I must give a little credit to Thackeray. This does not excuse these horrifying ideas, but it does reflect on our modern times. Political correctness of today demands that if a person does have racist thoughts, he or she must keep them private. Racism has not been solved by any means and I think racism is one of those unfortunate characteristics of human society that is nearly impossible to eradicate completely. However, as a society we’ve made strides to combat outright racism with political correctness, which has helped save the feelings of some others. In our society, it is unacceptable to express a racist comment in public and frowned upon when sharing among close friends and family typically. Admittedly, private racist comments do happen, but the public racist comments create a public firestorm when released. Donald Trumps very public infraction of political correctness when he uttered racist comments about people from Mexico (along with all sorts of other examples) is a very current example. Today’s norms concerning hushing racist comments are very different from the typical Victorian’s outright racist comments, but that is not to say that all Victorians shared this view. 

The abolitionist movement was starting to sway some people towards viewing other races as fellow men. Thackeray mentions Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the “Am I not a man and a brother?” medallion, which he openly denies them being men nor brothers (1023). Yet he does suggest that the addressee of the letter, Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth as becoming sympathetic to the movement and to black people being equal by saying in the second letter, “They are not suffering as you are impassioning yourself for their wrongs as you read Mrs. Stowe…” (1023).  This is not to say that Thackeray is against abolition or decent treatment towards black people though. He clearly states that he would never “…own a slave or flog him, or part him from his wife and children,” (1023). But then he goes on later to describe other races as unflattering in looks and inferior. I believe his and other Victorians sentiments have unfortunately not changed very much in today’s society. The majority of people today would wholeheartedly agree that slavery is immoral and should be illegal; most would also disagree with physically hurting or separating families based on race. However, we still face racism everyday through profiling, politics, individuals’ beliefs, our prison system, education, etc., and have yet to eradicate racism entirely.

Like the introduction to this context section stated, our current mindset is to read some of these excerpts with horror, but there is still so many racial issues that perhaps in “…150 years we will look back on the views that predominate in our own time with as much revulsion…” as we look at these racist excerpts (996).  In class there was the general consensus that racism is an abhorrent thing, but it still plagues our societies around the world—proof would be found in watching the evening news—but during our age racism is for the most part more slyly covered.