Classism and Racism Theme Analysis

Classism and racism are apparent throughout Gone with the Wind, before and after the Civil War. Before the war, high-class white enslavers believe that a “well-bred” Black person would not desire freedom. To white Southerners, free Blacks are unintelligent, low-class, and greedy. This opinion is also supported by Black characters like Mammy who, as an enslaved woman at Tara, believes she is superior to both other enslaved Black people and poor white families like the Slatterys, even though she isn’t free. After the war, Mammy continues to think of herself as superior to Black people who welcome their freedom and, in her reading, take advantage of it. White and formerly wealthy Southerners, such as the O’Haras, agree with her: many claim that Black people are harmless when in the hands of white, genteel families, and are dangerous if they’re free. These racist views ultimately lead to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, a group that hunts down and kills Black people for acting like they’re equal to whites. And one way Black people can escape the threat of the Ku Klux Klan is by aligning themselves with white families like Scarlett’s—which in Mammy’s case effectively keeps her enslaved, but also keeps her safe from racially motivated violence.

After the Civil War, classism and racism also affect the social politics of white people. Prior to the war, white society in the South is highly stratified, with wealthy plantation owners like the O’Haras at the top, and poor white people like the Slatterys at the bottom. So after the war, when Carpetbaggers and Scallawags stream south, most formerly wealthy Southerners are enraged: they see making money, as the Carpetbaggers and Scallawags do, as beneath them, and they look down on people who become wealthy and powerful by making money. However, Scarlett views befriending the opportunistic Carpetbaggers and Scallawags as a way for her to amass wealth and rise in class herself. She desires to be a great lady like her mother was, and she thinks that wealth is the only way to achieve this. But while the Northerners help lift the South out of poverty by normalizing work, the Republican government (which is sympathetic to the North) ultimately collapses under its own corruption, making way for Democrats to begin to reassert the racist and classist hierarchies the war sought to abolish. In this way, although the Civil War changes the South’s structures of racism and classism, it ultimately only drives classist and racist roots deeper into Southern society.