Discrimination In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Findlay Eyre

Ms. Moussa

E.L.A. 9-C

Findlay Eyre

Race also needs its breathing space

We all once thought racism was just people discriminating a race, but if you dig just a bit deeper its more than a one-sided conflict it is, in fact, a domino effect, easy to start but hard to stop. You can quickly realize how racism isn’t just so simple, and neither sides help each out. This builds more tension and provokes even more racism sometimes leading to people being completely isolated to “stop” the racism. But clearly isolation doesn't stop it either as I have seen with Crooks, a black stable buck in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (Penguin books 1993). As a reaction to the racism Crooks faces he actually makes his isolation and discrimination worse

The first way he had been isolated from others was, as Cooks recounts playing with white kids on his father's farm, but his father had stopped letting him play with the little white kids because of Crooks’s race and Crooks now rarely interacts with his fellow white farm mates. His dad stopping him from playing with the white kids is also a great example of how later on when he got his job on the farm he was put in his own little room isolated from the other white farm hands simply because he is black and he, therefore, isn't. Crook’s position as a stable buck is a strong reflection of the racism, the term stable buck simply is a derogatory term meaning a black man who works in a stable and the term buck is also a military designation, a private buck, which is the lowest rank in the army. All the whites simply don't like Crooks or any black people so the best way to get rid of them is to make them “disappear” into their own dark and isolated