Racism Within of Mice and Men

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silence

Crooks stood up from his bunk and faced her. “I had enough...You got no rights comin’ in a colored man’s room...Now you jus’ get out, an’ get out quick.”...She turned on him in scorn. “Listen, Nigger...You know what I could do?” Crooks seemed to grow smaller, and he pressed himself against the wall. “Yes ma’am.”...”Well you keep your place then, Nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t even funny”(Steinbeck 80-81).

The racism within this quote was blunt as well as vividly violent. After Crooks finally makes an attempt to liberate himself of the shadow of racism casted upon his existence, he is just as quickly put back into his place by a character who is in her own way in a similar situation, under the cloud of sexism. Not only does Curley’s wife use the aforementioned derogatory term, “nigger”, multiple times, she uses it in the worst way possible. She uses it to aid her in the dehumanization of Crooks, speaking to him in a way one would commonly speak to a dog. She even threatens him with lynching, a common form of execution used by groups of racist whites against black “criminals” of the time period.

Throughout all of this racism, Crooks always seems to know his place in society, avoiding any sort of physical harm during the novel. He dealt with more verbal abuse than any man should ever have to deal with, much like many african-americans of the time. He had his room, and he had his horseshoes, and he had his books. He accepted the racism that surrounded him and lived with the situation he had been given. For a novel with only one african american character, Steinbeck did an incredible job of demonstrating the segregation and racism experienced by blacks of the time and giving insight on the situation from the perspective of an African-American man within a white-dominated situation, making this a great example of an early 20th century novel that showcases racism.

Works Cited

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. The Penguin Group, 1937.

Pilgrim, David. “What was Jim Crow”. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Sept. 2000,

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm. Ferris State University.

Bellone Jr., C.Conway. “Of Mice and Men, America’s Mirror of Fallibilities”. Fiction Southeast,

01 Mar. 2016, http://fictionsoutheast.org/of-mice-and-men-americas-mirror-of-fallibilities/.