Social Construction of Race and Reality Term Paper

Social Construction of Race and Reality

Herman Melville's Benito Cereno is a story of race relations and a narrative of racial formation. The theories and definitions set out by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their article "Racial Formation in the United States" can easily be applied to Melville's novel. First, Benito Cereno details a slave revolt aboard a Spanish merchant ship off the coast of South America. The historical, political, economical, and social settings of Benito Cereno are at the root of the problems that Omi and Winant delineate. Indeed, the authors note on page 61 "It was only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere...that the distinctions and categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and to a discourse of race, began to appear." In "discovering" new faces and races, the European explorers were suddenly faced with a paradigm threat. On the one hand, cultural and religious ideals dictated that the indigenous people of the Americas and Africa were to be treated as "children of God." On the other hand, a "ferocious division of society erupted," (Omi and Winant 62). This division is clearly exemplified on board the San Dominick.

Captain Delano ascribes neither to the ethnicity paradigm nor to neoconservatism, but rather he is an early producer of the biological view on race. An American on board a Spanish slave-holding ship, he immediately perceives the blacks on board as chattel.This would have been the prevailing outlook of his day, during the heyday of the African slave trade among European nations. Captain Delano, when he first espies the ship, imagines the "cargo" initially as members of a "white washed monastery," and then as "throngs of dark cowls." This profound shift in attention from stark white to stark black exhibits Delano's tendency to create and categorize people according to political and social constructs. These constructs were formed by the colonial American society in which Delano lived. Racial formation in colonial America rapidly progressed during this era, and Captain Delano is a perfect representative and embodiment of it.

Benito Cereno is an ideal tale to analyze in terms of theories of racial formation because it identifies concepts of race applied to both black and Spanish people by the white captain. The brilliance in the story lies in the irony that underlies the mutiny and Delano's response to its buildup. Delano's concept of race is so deeply ingrained in his psyche that he fails to break free from its construct. Because politics and social norms in colonial America accepted, condoned, and encouraged -- through law -- this racism, Captain Delano exemplifies what Omi and Winant call a "racial dictatorship" This culturally and politically enforced racial dictatorship is what causes Delano's profound ignorance. The captain simply cannot conceive of Benito Cereno, Babo, or….....