History, Secrecy, and Racism Theme Analysis

The Nickel Boys is a novel about the lasting reverberations of slavery. Examining the ways in which a painfully racist history works its way into the present, Colson Whitehead draws an important distinction between laws and reality, demonstrating that racists often point to official condemnations of bigotry to avoid taking responsibility for their own prejudiced ways. For instance, Elwood and Turner attend Nickel Academy roughly 100 years after the end of slavery and right after the end of Jim Crow laws, but they still experience extreme bigotry, racial violence, and segregation. Although the school receives funding from the government and should therefore follow its desegregation laws, black students are nonetheless forced into inferior dorms and are in far more danger than white students. Not only are the two groups separated, but the administrators don’t hesitate to beat black students to death, knowing that nobody will hold the institution accountable. Because of this lack of accountability, the school is unspeakably cruel to young black boys , burying them in a secret graveyard and saying that they ran away. Most significantly, the general public doesn’t hear about this abuse until decades later, in contemporary times. The fact that the rest of the nation thinks it has achieved equality while such horrific racial violence continues to take place demonstrates that there is terrible secrecy surrounding such matters—secrecy that makes it even harder to address the fact that racism still exists.

The Nickel Boys takes place during a time of great change, shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to discriminate based on race, skin color, nationality, sex, or religion. Despite these official changes, though, both Elwood and Turner recognize that racism and bigotry still run rampant throughout their communities. This is especially the case at Nickel Academy, where black students are not only separated from their white peers, but are also subject to significantly harsher treatment. “You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other,” Turner believes, suspecting that the majority of the staff members belong to the Ku Klux Klan. This, Turner thinks, is evidence of the fact that the law has almost no effect on how people truly behave. His cynicism in this moment urges readers to consider how white people actually act on an everyday basis, regardless of what the laws say. That Spencer and other Nickel employees continue to perpetuate bigotry proves that true change must take place within actual communities and on an individual level, not just in the government.

What’s more, the disconnect between the country’s civil rights laws and its actual practices is particularly harmful because it means that racial violence often takes place in the shadows. This is certainly the case at Nickel Academy, where there’s a secret graveyard for black students whom the administrators have beaten to death. There is also an official graveyard, Boot Hill, but even the records for this gravesite are incomplete and vague, since many of the students buried there died in suspicious ways that Nickel has purposefully obscured. For instance, the administration claims that some of these students were killed while on “unauthorized leave,” despite the fact that the school used to rent them out as laborers to various townspeople, meaning that their business off-campus was quite obviously not unauthorized. Still, the administration has avoided scrutiny simply by hiding this aspect of history. This, in turn, demonstrates that Nickel Academy simply distorts the stories behind the students’ deaths, twisting the narratives in its own favor to hide their racist roots.

When reading The Nickel Boys, it’s worth keeping in mind that Nickel Academy is based on a real reform school, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. As is the case in the novel, the Dozier School was shut down in 2011, meaning that its clandestine violence continued long after corporal punishment fell out of common practice. In The Nickel Boys, news of the secret graveyard astounds the general public after an archaeology class from the University of Southern Florida unearths it. Even though the Nickel Boys have been talking about the secret graveyard for a long time, nobody has believed them until now. This perfectly illustrates the problematic fact that many Americans choose to ignore reality until the government or some other official entity acknowledges it, especially when it comes to racism. This is why there was such a disconnect in the 1960s between civil rights legislation and the continued existence of bigotry—white Americans were happy to believe that the country had left behind racism when, in reality, this was hardly the case. Whitehead, for his part, is interested in how racism continues to work its way through society, manifesting itself in many different ways. For instance, when Millie considers the many small acts of discrimination she experiences at the hands of white people in contemporary times, she sees them as part of a “routine humiliation” that she forces herself to ignore because she thinks she would become an emotional wreck if she didn’t. That Millie finds this coping mechanism necessary indicates that bigotry is still at work in the United States. Consequently, Whitehead implies that Americans must not make the mistake of ignoring reality, which only allows racism and discrimination to flourish—just like it did at Nickel Academy.