Separate and Unequal: The Traumatic Consequences of American Hostipitality Based on Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys

Abstract

Within its near century-long presence, the Jim Crow era significantly stained American history, politics, and society. Through conditioned freedom and under the false guise of “separate equality” came mistreatment, hostility, and racial oppression of African Americans who, forced to a life in the margins, were neither invited nor accepted as part of the culture. The present paper aims to examine the repercussions of American hostipitality in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, delving into racial segregation and foregrounding its hostile and marginalizing nature. The analysis is conducted through the postcolonial lens of the subaltern social positioning of African Americans, supplemented by trauma theory as the novel, at its core, reflects a traumatic coming of age. African American subalternity is reflected in characters’ erasure within the borders of society, which, in turn, is solidified in their internalized racism and, subsequently, racial trauma. Prisoned in their subalternity and treated as “the Other,” less valuable second-class citizens, the novel foregrounds the notion that the Jim Crow stereotype of intellectually inferior, idle, and unhygienic black Americans, led to the minority’s oppressive dehumanization, especially visible through institutional racism – its executed expansion of racial disparity and psychological abuse.