Devil In A Blue Dress Analysis

In the book ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ by Walter Mosley the African American protagonist, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, sets out to find a missing young woman. Due to Easy’s skin color his journey to find the young woman becomes difficult as he encounters some people who don’t want to help him and feel like his journey is pointless because they discriminate against him. Predigest is a strong feature in this book as most of the characters Easy encounters are Caucasian and because the book takes place in the early 40’s racism is a prominent feature during the time period.

At the beginning of the book after Easy acquired his new job he went into town to try and question some people. When Easy locates a nearby gang and begins questioning them the first thing he notices about them was their appearance. A quote from the beginning of the book that shows this is “Dark skin like an India Indian… he looked Chinese around the eyes”. This quote shows how even though Easy is a minority he has no problem internally discriminating and

In one of the final chapters Easy reconnects with one of his long time friends and they talked about how they don’t like being discriminated against because of their skin color and how they used to be able to hang out with one another without someone bothering them or discriminating against them. A quote that supports this is “Back then before ancestry had been discovered a Mexican and a Negro considered themselves the same”. The idea that racial predigest is fully developed when the author shows that it’s hard for the protagonist to go awhile without being discriminated against or internally discriminating against someone else. Additionally, this connects back to my personal essential question by showing that internal discrimination is something that's triggered by someone, it’s an internal desire to figure out who someone is by connecting them to