Response Paper

Race Relations and Powerplay: Relating Texts

“It made her furious to think that this black animal had the right to complain against her, against the behavior of a white woman.”-Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing

Racism, prejudice, and intergroup relations are hot topics addressed at length in a variety of media. Pop-culture often opens for discussion the issues of ethnocentrism with regard to the dominant forces in society and the pervasiveness of the master and slave relationship. The film Crash as written by Paul Haggis reveals and highlights a great deal of the themes brought into light by Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. The two texts tie in themes of ethnic psychology, the allocation of power between race groups, and assumed White superiority.

In the field of social psychology, much of the continuing discussion revolves around the balance of power between race groups. I think the root of a lot of racial tension and conflict stems from an ethnocentric ideology that allows one group to feel entitled to power over another. Lessing writes that two of the farm wives, Mary and her neighbor, Mrs. Slatter, have little else to talk about besides their frustrations with natives:

“...Individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them. They loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labor, no idea of improving themselves by hard work.”(Lessing 82)

This quote is a prime example of ethnocentric attribution. Ethnocentric attribution is the phenomenon where “...failure and negative behaviors exhibited by an outgroup member are more likely to be attributed to internal, dispositional causes than the same negative behavior by an ingroup member (where it is more likely to be attributed to external or situation causes)”(Brewer and Miller 83). Essentially, this means that Mary and Mrs. Slatter attribute the dismal misfortune of natives to something intrinsic, that they bring negative outcomes upon themselves, while if the roles had been switched, they would attribute the quality of their lives to something situational that couldn’t be helped. The idea also works in the reverse, allowing the women to feel they had earned anything in their lives that was better than the natives’. This point of view is exhibited by many people with high prejudice levels and is one of the keys to intergroup discrimination and the allocation of worth, and thus power, in society.

Similarly, there is an argument in Crash between a Caucasian man and an African American woman that seems to demonstrate ethnocentric attribution. The man, John Ryan, is trying to earn compassion from the woman, Shaniqua Johnson. He explains that his father built his business from the ground up, employing an all Black staff. He goes on to say that after the city decided to give preference to minority owned businesses, his father lost everything. The character is attributing his father’s success to his own dedication and hard work, and his failure to outside influences. In the same sentence, he attributes the success of the minorities to the graciousness of his father, and the preference given to them by the city as a circumstantial force that they didn’t earn. The attribution of positive and negative qualities goes far to allocate wealth and power in society, and these two examples from pop-culture stand as prime examples for a lot of the human psychology behind this balance.

There is a running observation in popular culture that examines the complex structure of the master-slave relationship. This form of interaction is observable in almost any circle of society but seems to hold the most consequence in interracial interactions. Lessing’s character, Mary Turner, is the indirect employer of several servants and farmhands. She is almost tyrannical in her approach to managing them, which causes the servants to harbor a great deal of animosity towards her. The upset in the novel occurs when the master-slave relationship is disturbed. The two parties are so set in the nature of their interactions that they’re caught off guard when the balance shifts and chaos ensues. In the case of The Grass is Singing, the upset ends in Mary’s demise. 

Paul Haggis created a character in Crash named Jean Cabot. Mrs. Cabot is a wealthy White woman, married to the District Attorney of Los Angeles. She constantly relies on the services of minorities to clean her house, change her locks and wash her clothes. They never seem to be able to satisfy her wants, and she sees them as untrustworthy and incompetent. Towards the end of the movie she is explaining to a friend that she is in a chronic state of inexplicable anger. She falls down the stairs immediately after, and finds that her affluent White friends are unwilling to help, and it’s her Mexican housekeeper that ends up taking her to the hospital. In Mrs. Cabot’s final scene, she is shown crying on the shoulder of her housekeeper, who she admits is her best friend. In this instance, the inversion of the master-slave relationship results in a better understanding of both parties but it takes a dramatic event to initiate the shift.

Often times, racism seems like a fairly cut and dry issue. Overt racism is on the downturn, but we still witness racial tension and conflict. These events are the result of deeply embedded ethnocentrism and complex social structures. Pop-culture and the media have taken upon themselves the task of examining the subtleties of these issues over the years. The evolution and nature of intergroup relationships is represented well in both Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing and Paul Haggis' Crash. The two texts critically consider the driving forces behind these radical interactions, the discovery of which is the first step to bettering them.

Works Cited

Brewer, Marilynn B. Intergroup relations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Pub. Co., 1996.

Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. Perf. Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock and Ludacris. DVD. Lions Gate Films, 2005.

Lessing, Doris. The Grass Is Singing. HarperCollins, 2008.

On My Contribution to the Will and Grace Presentation

It was my group’s responsibility to create a presentation that relates the TV show “Will and Grace” to the class theme of radical romance, and to use that presentation to engage the class in a scholarly discussion. My group members and I met on four separate occasions outside of class to talk about the show and how we could energize the topic. I think the work was evenly divided, and all of us managed to contribute something important and relevant to the discussion. It was my job, and I use that term loosely because we all chose topics that we were most interested in, to talk about the relationship between the characters Jack McFarland and Karen Walker. I spent hours watching the show, building an argument. The first thing to capture my attention was the extremely physical relationship the two characters had, even though Jack’s character is gay. Building off of that, I wondered why the show needed to create a sexual energy between the two, so I decided to talk about the heterosexual biases of the writers and the necessity for heteronormative themes to keep the attention of a largely heterosexual audience. I also tied my topic into Alex’s, whose was the similarly heteronormative relationship between Will and Grace. Our group went on to explore the representation of homosexuality in the media, how the series might pertain to “The History of Sexuality,” as well as other outside texts, and the way the show was perceived by a general population and their views on the issue of homosexuality. Again, I feel that the entire group pulled its own weight and came together to produce a quality and active presentation.

Responses to "The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The African landscape seems split into several sections. Mary comes from “town,” the heavily commercialized area where the colonialists tend to settle, it is the most “Brittainized” area in the novel. Mary is extricated from the town to live with Dick on his farm. The farms are part of the expanse of African wilderness where its inhabitants are subject to all the wiles of nature and consequences thereof. Charlie Sattler views Dick’s farm as a resource to be exploited, like his own farm, when Dick fails and the farm crosses into Charlie’s hands. To Charlie, farming is to make money. To Mary farming is nothing, and she’d rather have nothing to do with it. To Dick, farming is everything.

2.      The novel centers on an implied sexual relationship between Mary and Moses before her demise. A lot of the hard feelings felt towards Mary after her death were derived from this ambiguous relationship she had with her houseboy. There was a part of the novel that discusses how desperate the white man was to keep the natives in a subservient part of their culture, lest there be an uprising that would change the structure of the society and raise costs of labor. The traditional fear of black sexuality was that the savage black men would come to steal the virtue of the white women, and because it seemed Moses has succeeded in establishing this dominance, they would both suffer for the turbulence it would bring to society.

3.      Mary’s fears of marriage seem to stem from a fear of being dominated. She was always her own woman, not too unique but always responsible for her own decisions and actions. When she forsakes her longing to self-dominance and allows Dick to become her “master” she begins to seek dominance over the natives on the farm. She lives in an angry fear that the natives would be able to establish dominance over her one day, which is exactly what happens in the end.

4.      When Mary overhears her friends saying “she’s not like that” she becomes uneasy. She suddenly scrambles to avoid being this abnormality that her friends would discuss in distaste. She decides she must get married. Because she forced herself against her own nature, because Mary was indeed “not like that,” she set herself on this track that would lead her into misery. When she finally breaks down at the end the book, she reflects on this statement and how it led her to this despair.

5.      Lessing doesn’t criticize the myth of the sexually potent black man at all. Moses establishes both mental and sexual dominance over Mary, and when she asks him to leave, he murders her.

6.      The Turner’s house is the cage in which Mary and Dick are trapped. Dick recognizes this, but seems to have learned to cope with it. Mary struggles between wanting to leave and not being able to, this confinement drives her mad with depression and insecurity.

7.      Moses could almost be seen as the personification of all of the forces that working towards Mary’s destruction. His point of view is as mute as nature’s itself. He is this momentum that Mary fights against, her dominance and will are pit against his, but he is almost more setting than character, he seems to have no thoughts or feelings of his own, but only a capacity to push.

8.      Mary is constantly drawing parallels between the marriage of her parents and her own. Her mother was trapped in an unhappy marriage where she felt her husband wasn’t supporting her or provided the life she wanted. Her father was not necessarily a mean man, but he was a drunk and a symbol of dominance and gravity in Mary’s mind. Much like her father, Moses gained dominance over Mary and became this paternal, masterful figure.,

9.      Mary would like to have economic independence, but is unable. She attempts to gain some when she enjoys a brief stint of power over the farm, but her endeavor fails. She tries to exercise some sort of economic control through Dick to change the way the farm is run, she tries to manipulate him into treating the natives the way she felt they ought to be and grow the crops she thought she should. She treats her identity in much the same way, she is defined by the things that make her miserable and by the shortcomings of those around her.

10.  Mary’s character is confined by the institutions of marriage, “slavery,” and economy. Her loveless, cold, marriage with Dick tied her to the farm she hated and life she despised. The master-slave relationship she held with the natives demanded that she struggle for dominance, a struggle in which she would ultimately fail, which would cause her destruction. The institution of economy keeps Mary in poverty, an endless cycle that even further tied her to the life she hated and relationships she loathed.

11.  Mary’s psychological breakdown occurs shortly after Moses becomes a paternal figure, a dominant one. When they had their first interaction in the field, Mary becomes physically terrified when she thought Moses was about to strike her. This display of fear made her always uneasy around him as her houseboy. When their relationship would alter to a latently sexual, “slave” dominated exchange, her psyche could bear the struggle no longer and she succumbed to all that worked against her, and broke down.

12.  For Mary, salvation would be brought through the leaving the farm. When her breakdown began, it was largely in part due to her acceptance of this fate. Her visions of living in town again were dashed, and hope was dismantled. Even in her death, she is tormented by the disdain of the people whose opinions she felt mattered more than her own identity, the opinions that would lead her to Dick’s farm.