Socially Constructed Divisions

I understand more of Booker T. Washington, once an isolated APUSH figure, as I relate his ideas to Song of Solomon. Morrison and Washington share some ideas as seen by comparing her book and "Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are," a speech by the later. While each work gets into specifics not completely related, the main points behind both are very similar, like the idea that racial divisions are created by society and that they must be destroyed for people to have equal opportunities.
In Song of Solomon, a rich African American family is isolated from the upper class because of their color while differentiated from poor African Americans because of their money. The stereotypes that classified people into rich Whites or poor Blacks left the Dead family in an undefined spot of society. Throughout the book each family member struggles to find his or her place in society because of the stratifying ideas implanted in their thoughts. Macon Sr is obsessed with having a family that behaves in a high-class manner. Ruth doesn't truly get along neither with white upper class women nor with poor African Americans. The children of these two struggle to find a way to live as they don't fit in mainstream stereotypes and are perplexed by their parents and their ideas about status in society. As a result of the social ideas of the parents, their children become incompatible with society and fail according to their standards. Neither of the daughters can get married and Milkman just wants to get away. Because of the strict classifying ideas of society, the children were excluded from some groups and didn't fully fit in anywhere. While not being a member of a specific group can be bad, the book also shows how social divisions affected most African Americans. As people discriminate because of the color of the skin, many other characteristics are oversimplified into being features of a race. Morrison shows that many characteristics of people are falsely attributed to the fallacious idea of race.

Booker T. Washington's speech is much more political but it shares Morrison's ideas about race. He says, "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities." The previous quotation shows that the false distinctions created by the idea of race keep people from prospering. If someone concretely divides White roles from Black roles in society, slavery or unfair labor conditions are created. Race is a fallacy as it assumes that traits shared by a group of people similar in color are an effect of this. By socially constructing these differences between Blacks and Whites, discrimination begins to happen. Washington suggests that we get rid of those differences by having similar opportunities and forgiving bad aspects of this erroneous differentiation as obsessing about discrimination towards a specific group might lead to acknowledge that the group exists. He ends the speech promoting "absolute justice" and the "blotting out of sectional differences" because the differences should exist.

Both Morrison and Washington subtly or directly show that the existence of race is damaging to society. Race is a many questions fallacy, one "in which two or more issues get merged into one," using Thank You For Arguing's definition. Undoubtedly there are people with different tones of skin, which does have a biological basis, but this doesn't mean that there are two distinct groups of humans. Washington does concede to the idea of race by asking employers to hire African Americans instead of European immigrants, but the basis for his argument isn't about racial differences but instead about socioeconomic difference (his arguments apply also to poor White Americans). The issue of discrimination, as seen in these two works issued almost a century apart, comes from the existence of the idea of race.