America’s Enabler: How Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad Contributes to Racial Inertia
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was met with near universal acclaim and enjoys regard as an important work which illustrates the difficulty and horror that was black life under chattel slavery. This essay argues that despite the work’s stated purpose, its ultimate, if unintended effect is to reify the current racial hierarchy. Drawing primarily from current events and an Afropessimist framework, I attempt to illustrate how this work, and others like it, occupy a specific space in the cultural zeitgeist bent to a specific purpose: obfuscating contemporary liberalism’s current transgressions from its past ones and maintaining a social stratum with blackness fixed to its lowest tier.
afropessimism, anti-blackness, African American Studies, Modern Literature
City University of New York - City College
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