Every day there is a baby born with either a different colored skin, squinched eyes, or with deformity. Due to these or other reasons, many parents decide to give up their child or make them feel inferior which makes it an act of discrimination. Kate Chopin’s short story, “Desiree’s Baby,” is a story mainly about racism, and it talks about how racial prejudice can affect a child. Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another or defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary as “poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race.” Racism may be described as the hatred of one person by another because of skin color, language, culture, place of birth or anything that reveals the basic nature of that
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First of all, Armand Aubigny fell in love with a “beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere” Desiree, as described by Chopin. They got married and had a baby, which helped Armand change his way of treating the slaves. Before he married Desiree and the baby’s birth, according to Chopin, Armand’s “rule was a strict one” when dealing with his slaves, and “ under it his negroes had forgotten how to be gay,” (Chopin,2). However, “ marriage and later the birth of his son had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly,” (Chopin, 2). Desiree says that “he hasn’t punished one of [the slaves]- not one of them- since baby is born,” which means that Armand no longer punished his slaves as badly after the baby was born, (Kate Chopin, 2). The way that Armand would treat his slaves was an act of racism even though that was very common in that time …show more content…
In this time period there was slavery and racism like there was in the story. Many people believe that racism has always existed, but it actually originated with capitalism and the slave trade. As the Marxist writer CLR James put it, “ The conception of deciding people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had… that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race,” (Taylor, 1). Racism was the consequence of slavery and how the slaves were poorly treated, as historian Eric Williams writes in his book ‘Capitalism and Slavery,’ “Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery,” (Selfa,
First of all, Armand Aubigny fell in love with a “beautiful and gentle, affectionate and sincere” Desiree, as described by Chopin. They got married and had a baby, which helped Armand change his way of treating the slaves. Before he married Desiree and the baby’s birth, according to Chopin, Armand’s “rule was a strict one” when dealing with his slaves, and “ under it his negroes had forgotten how to be gay,” (Chopin,2). However, “ marriage and later the birth of his son had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly,” (Chopin, 2). Desiree says that “he hasn’t punished one of [the slaves]- not one of them- since baby is born,” which means that Armand no longer punished his slaves as badly after the baby was born, (Kate Chopin, 2). The way that Armand would treat his slaves was an act of racism even though that was very common in that time …show more content…
In this time period there was slavery and racism like there was in the story. Many people believe that racism has always existed, but it actually originated with capitalism and the slave trade. As the Marxist writer CLR James put it, “ The conception of deciding people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had… that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race,” (Taylor, 1). Racism was the consequence of slavery and how the slaves were poorly treated, as historian Eric Williams writes in his book ‘Capitalism and Slavery,’ “Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery,” (Selfa,