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Dramatic Irony
Letter 56
Explanation and Analysis—White Missionaries:
In the following excerpt from Letter 56, Nettie describes her visit to New York City to Celie. While in the city with her missionary friends, Nettie encounters a white missionary woman with troubling—albeit common, for the time—opinions on indigenous Africans. These troubling opinions contain a clear logical fallacy:
She is said to be much loved by the natives even though she thinks they are an entirely different species from what she calls Europeans. . . . She says an African daisy and an English daisy are both flowers, but totally different kinds.
This white missionary claims that indigenous people and Europeans are "different species," yet compares these two groups of people to an "African daisy" and an "English daisy," undermining her own logic. These two types of daisies are different variants, but remain part of the same species—and so are all human beings, regardless of the color of their skin.
This passage highlights the logical flaws in common racist arguments. The fallacy depicted also alludes to the constructed nature of race: European anthropologists invented these categories, creating race science as a means of subdividing the human species into castes. While many people—including the white missionary in the above passage—view race as a fundamental, unchanging aspect of biology, these notions are wildly inaccurate. Race is a series of socially-constructed categories that have had biological definitions imposed upon them.
Related Themes:
