A Disturbing Scene In Toni Morrison's Beloved

A disturbing scene in Beloved contains many parallels to modern society, specifically the way in which black people are treated in America. When Sethe finally could not bear the cruelty of slavery any more, she fled to the North in hope for a better life for her and her children. Unfortunately, because she could produce many healthy children, she was viewed as a valuable asset to her owner. The schoolteacher believed she was an asset too valuable to simply forget about. When the schoolteacher found where Sethe had fled, Sethe had to make a crucial decision. She could either kill her children and herself to ‘save’ them from slavery, or she could submit to the white men and go back to a life that could be considered worse than death. The schoolteacher was the embodiment of harm and is parallel to the vicious injustice and discrimination that goes on in the United States of America. On surface level, the scene seems like solely a terrifying experience, but there is much more complexity to the matter. The traumatizing experience changed the lives of everyone present. Inside the shed it said, “Two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a n----- woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other.” Morrison …show more content…
Although progress is being made, the denial of racism in America greatly slows that progress. Simply because overt racism has drastically decreased, many people love to argue that black people should stop complaining about racism because it does not exist. An institutionalized racism that arose from slavery still haunts the nation. When a problem like racism transforms from simply yelling racial slurs to a prison industrial complex, many people like to simply believe it doesn’t exist because they don’t want to think and examine the complexity of the