Prejudice And Racism Exposed In Shakespeare's Othello

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, the play tells the story of a man named Othello who falls into a spiral of jealousy by the hands of a manipulative antagonist. The play, written in 17th-century London, examines the sentiment towards the interracial relationship, specifically the relationship between Othello, a black man, and Desdemona, a white woman. Analyzing the play through a critical race theory lense, it is evident that the poignant racism rooted in society aided in Othello’s demise. In Shakespeare’s Othello, the transgressiveness and the ultimate fall of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship with each other highlights the alarming impact of the systemic racism that was embedded into the story and characters in Othello. In a white-dominated

In Joyce Green MacDonald’s essay on Othello, MacDonald shares what a white audience member felt like when he saw Ira Aldridge, a black actor who played Othello, with two white women outside of the theatre. The white audience member “...was looking at a spectacle which, with all its suggestions of a double racial and sexual transgression, challenged the limits of the scopophilic power of white gazes to produce black and female subjects” (MacDonald 239). To the white audience member, viewing this “spectacle” in the 19th-century, of not one, but multiple white women being with a black man is alarming because it challenges the audience member’s belief to see black bodies as people that could involve sexuality. There was a limit that white men had to see a black body and think of it in a sexual manner. The clear transgressiveness a white woman being sexually attracted and involved with a black man, (especially one who becomes her husband like in Othello), is a societal hysteria that disrupted that audience members core. In fact, McDonald details how the sexual shock of Othello and Desdemona in bed together “was enough to cause one female spectator to faint” while seeing the play (MacDonald 242). As we see in Othello, the idea that black bodies are unalluring to

When Othello is pondering why Desdemona might cheat on him his reaction is “Haply, for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have, or for I am declined / Into the vale of years” (Shakespeare 3.3.268-271). The first possible explanation that Othello can muster when he wonders why he would be cheated on, his biggest “weakness” that he can think of, is his race. Othello has been so intensely affected by racism to the point where he now believes the biggest reason his wife would want another man is because his race is inferior to hers. This tragic thought-process allows him to be so easily insecure and angry because he is aware that his skin color has unfairly caused him so much discrimination and pain. The idea that black bodies were repulsive and inferior to white bodies is one that MacDonald explains clearly in her essay. When referring to how white audience members felt about seeing a black actor play Othello for the first time, she explains that “British reviewers were haunted by Aldridge's physical appearance...his blackness probably constitutes a variation on this recurring theme of the resistant strangeness of black bodies” (MacDonald 242). A black man was so undesirable, so uncomfortable to white citizens, and as Othello remembers this sheer fact,