6 May, 2024

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a seminal feminist novel depicting an ustopia– a word Atwood coined “by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other” (according to “Margaret Atwood: the Road to Ustopia”)– in which gender-based oppression is the solution to their society’s fertility issue. In 2017, showrunner and executive producer Bruce Miller decided to transform the story into a television series, dedicating a Hulu show to the fictional nation of Gilead. One of the major differences between Atwood’s 1985 novel and the 2017 Hulu adaptation is the presence of people of color, an inclusion only in the series. Atwood, in reflecting the Christian fundamentalist foundations of Gilead, explains that all people of color were sent to the Colonies and the non-white females were considered Unwomen because they would create a stain on the pure bloodline Gilead hopes to produce. The show, in contrast, subscribes to “color-blind casting,” a practice that consists of casting characters without considering the actor’s race. Thus, it is impossible to tell a truly anti-racist, intersectional, feminist story from the perspective of a white person as seen in both the 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale novel as well as the 2017 Hulu television series of the same name because of the problem of colorblindness, white feminism, and the history of enslaved peoples in the United States.

While Atwood follows a more realistic path of fundamentalism, the prominence of whiteness cements the novel as a product of the second wave of feminism, an era pioneered by Betty Friedman’s 1968 book The Feminine Mystique. This wave “focused on the rights of women in the workplace, reproductive rights and domestic violence…  neglecting the fact that Black and Latinx women had been working outside of their homes for centuries.” That is to say, second wave feminists saw themselves as pioneers of the movement, working toward equality for white women, ignoring the fact that women of color have had to overcome the very problems they thought revolutionary decades and even centuries before. The show, while trying to cater to a more diverse audience, minimizes the reality of racial discrimination and injustice in both a dystopian society such as Gilead, as well as the one in which we live now. Both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, both written by white people, attempt to create an intersectional universe that acknowledges racial discrimination in conjunction with gender oppression, and both versions fail to do so. 

Dystopian themes are a direct reflection of existing historical marginalizations and oppressions that have happened in the real world in which an author is writing from. A large amount of dystopian fiction has, according to scholar Kayla Bowman, been based on slave-era policies. She discusses American literary critic James Boyd White’s exploration of law and literature coinciding. She argues, in her thesis “In/Visibilizing Race: The “Colorblind” Problem of Public Policy Representation in The Handmaid’s Tale,” that The Handmaid’s Tale is a representation of the “Law in Literature” (Bowman, 5) concept, meaning that legal terms, histories, and executions are integrated throughout the framework of the novel to the extent that Gilead is a reflection of historical American legal practices. By creating a subjugation of women that not only implies, but explicitly cements Gilead as a slave state, and in the process erases Black identities in Gilead, Atwood effectively ignores the history of slavery and violence against Black women in the country. Atwood has said the following regarding her inspiration for creating the novel: “Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already” (Atwood, 2018). Following both the law in literature theory as well as Atwood’s own statements on her American antebellum inspiration for Gilead, the argument that Atwood appropriates the slave narrative and imagines its placement exclusively on white women is reinforced. 

This is not to say that Atwood is intentionally racist. Although she has never explicitly discussed the topic or complication of race in relation to the story, it can be confidently inferred that she is taking implicitly anti-racist measures to produce the narrative. The definition of anti-racism that aligns with the purpose of this essay comes from Boston University’s Community Service Center and is as follows: “Anti-Racism is the practice of actively identifying and opposing racism. The goal of anti-racism is to actively change policies, behaviors, and beliefs that perpetuate racist ideas and actions.” Atwood, in expelling people of color from Gilead, acknowledges the beliefs of the Christian fundamentalist movement that she takes great structural inspiration from. In doing so, she accurately follows the social norms that members of that group would follow. 

In her piece “Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood addresses the cognitive dissonance between the common Christian practices she emulates to create Gilead and her own beliefs. In discussing the inspiration for punishments members of Gilead had to either perform or receive, she says that they did not come from her own “deplorable” beliefs, but rather from “Western society, and within the ‘Christian’ tradition itself. (I enclose ‘Christian’ in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)” (Atwood, 2018). In this quote, we can extrapolate her own beliefs, as she considers “The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights” to be “deplorable.” Thus, while she never explicitly says it, she is attempting to follow what we would contemporarily consider anti-racist practices in her explicit criticism of antebellum slavery.

While this “appropriation” of the American slave narrative seems like it would further problematize Atwood’s ignorance of Black stories, it instead complicates her compliance with the racist perspective: “The novel’s social criticism arose from apprehension among second-wave feminists about the potential for the religious right to assert patriarchal dominance through political power and sexual repression” (Bowman, 8). One can argue that Atwood is being inherently problematic in using the slave narrative to push forward a white feminist perspective of sexism and oppression; however, when viewing the novel through a lens in which it itself is a critique of second wave and white feminism, the power and respect of Black stories and legacies is regained. American Civil Rights Activist and critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw created the term intersectionality in 1989, just four years after the publication of Atwood’s original novel, to describe the way in which multiple marginalized identities work together in society: “Intersectionality is the understanding that social inequalities are interdependent and indivisible from one another” (Christoffersen, Emejulu, introduction).  Some argue that through Offred’s oral narration comes an acknowledgement of “‘double enslavement’” (Bowman, 9), the concept of which is similar to intersectionality, in that it reflects the reality of Black women who were enslaved both because of her race and her gender, which are inseparable from each other.

Many female slave narratives were told orally, and Offred’s oral story is a continuation of that tradition. Bowman continues to posit that not only is it a reflection of these traditions, but this theory also holds legal standing, as both Handmaids and enslaved African American women were legally prohibited from reading and writing, thus causing them to turn to oral narration. “The Handmaid’s Tale draws on the tradition of the oral narration of slave narratives in order to compare Offred’s relationship with the Commander to that of master and slave, and to suggest that resistance to such oppressive anti-literacy laws comes through oral traditions” (Bowman, 10). While these explanations have been used to excuse Atwood’s expulsion of people of color from the world of Gilead– in that she is following Christian and historical precedence, reflecting what would likely happen if it were to be an actualized state– she is implicating herself in the continued marginalization of women and all people of color by not giving them a voice. 

Religion is not only an implied influence in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it is significant to Gileadean society as well. One of the main power-holding structures in Gilead is based on Christianity and a warped view of the Bible. Offred, who is familiar with Bible verses and the original Christian beliefs, reflects on the “before times” and how religion was once something she thought of passively. The Commanders and Aunts utilize verses and stories from the Bible to control those under them, such as the Handmaids. In one instance, Offred notices Aunt Lydia’s misquotation of Isaiah 40:6-8. In reference to the possibility of an Eye– a secret police enforcement unit in Gilead– making sexual advancements on a Handmaid, she says: “All flesh is weak,” to which Offred internally responds: “All flesh is grass, I corrected herein my head” (Atwood, 37). In this instance, Aunt Lydia is overtly changing the words of the Bible to fit her and Gilead’s agenda. 

We see this further explored in Atwood’s 2019 sequel to the novel The Testaments, as young Aunts-in-training Agnes Jemima/Aunt Victoria and Becka/Aunt Immortelle are finally given library privileges and begin to read the real, unedited Bible. Appalled at the difference between what they were taught by the Aunts growing up in Gilead, Agnes begins to question the very structure in which she so proudly believed in before: “Up until that time I had not seriously doubted the rightness and especially the truthfulness of Gilead’s theology” (Atwood, 250). While we are not investigating race in The Testaments, it is important to address the fact that the Gileadean government perverted a religion based on equality, the extent to which is only fully revealed in the sequel. With this expansion of the fallacies in Gilead’s religious teachings and appropriations of the Bible, we can begin to apply Christian Fundamentalism to the racial aspect of this essay and explore white supremacy as religion.

White supremacy has been one of the longest standing and strongest institutions in the 34United States. Investigative journalist Michael Luo explores this topic and elevates his study to suggest that Christianity in America has altogether become a new religion entirely unrelated to its original foundations. In his New Yorker article titled “American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem” he discusses Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in the context of his former master’s conversion to Christianity. Douglass hoped that this migration to faith would make him more “‘humane’” and potentially even free his slaves, but instead his introduction to organized religion made him “‘more cruel and hateful in all his ways’” (Luo, 2020). Douglass goes on to specify that he “believed that ‘the widest possible difference’ existed between the ‘slaveholding religion of this land’ and ‘the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ’” (Luo, 2020). In other words, he does not believe that all religions are inherently evil or foster hate as his statement might suggest, but rather that there is a manipulative religion unique to the United States that upholds the system of white supremacy and slavery.

This concept can and should be applied to the universe of The Handmaid’s Tale as well, as the way in which Gilead strays so far from the written beliefs of Christianity for the purpose of institutionalizing a gender-based hierarchy is nearly identical to that of the “slaveholding religion” Douglass endures. Thus, we can extrapolate that white supremacy itself rules as their religion, rather than the tenets of Jesus that Christianity is supposed to be based on. In Atwood’s continuation of American slavery’s Christian metamorphoses to fit the respective leaders’ own racist agenda, she both perpetuates these racist ideologies as well as critiques them. That is to say, through the fact of her being a white author who has not experienced racism firsthand, much less the enslavement that Douglass did, it can be argued that she does not have the right to write white stories based on racist practices.

Another complication that arises in both the television series and the original novel is the extraordinarily disproportionate maternal and infant mortality rates between Black birthing parents and non-Black birthing parents. According to “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery,” an article published in the National Library of Medicine by professors of history Dierdre Cooper Owens and Sharla M. Fett, “non-Hispanic Black infant mortality is 2.3 times higher than mortality among non-Hispanic White babies” as of 2016, a number that has more than doubled since antebellum slavery. Atwood implicitly makes an effort to acknowledge the disparity between how white infants were systemized during slavery, as she mirrors the fact that during pre-antebellum America “White women’s childbearing built free patriarchal lineages” (Owens, Fett, 2019). In Gilead’s own patriarchal structure in which white women are forced to give birth to children that they then have to give to their Commanders and are forbidden from seeing again, she ignores Black women and their very real fertility struggles. During slavery, “in the South an estimated 50% of enslaved infants were stillborn or died within the first year of life” (Owens, Fett, 2019). In Gilead, the Handmaid system was created because, along with rampant infertility in the fictionalized pre-Gilead United States, the same thing was happening to a majority of children. Thus, Atwood applies another historic Black struggle to white people. 

While it can be argued that Atwood is purposefully acknowledging the plights of enslaved women in a new context, as the Gileadean system is based off of the American slavery system, the current infant mortality rates amongst non-white communities are still extraordinarily disproportionate, to the extent that “pregnancy-related mortality is three to four times higher among Black women than among White women” (Owens, Fett, 2019). Here, Atwood’s failure is not in representing the legacy of slavery through the lens of white people (which is problematic in and of itself), but rather it is through her failure to acknowledge the continued institutionalized racism in the country. The television series becomes problematic through this perspective as well despite their inclusion of people of color as Handmaids. Rather than deescalate the disparity between Black and non-Black maternal and infant mortality rates, the show neglects it altogether, consequently implying that the issue is nonexistent. While it can be argued that the narrative of the show specifically takes place in a different universe, multiple showrunners have stated that they create and include plots as “direct commentar[ies]” on current political and social occurrences in the United States and across the world (Bowman, 12).

The Hulu series, which subscribes to color-blind casting, routinely ignores people of color when confronted with real-world issues. One of the major differences between the 1985 novel and the 2017 television show is the temporal space of the plot. In the 2017 version, current issues such as the #MeToo movement and border control policies are integrated, if slightly fictionalized. In one scene in particular, as Bowman describes, the latter is echoed greatly, as June’s daughter is physically ripped from her arms. Interestingly and extremely problematically, in its “direct commentary on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border regarding separating migrant mothers from their children” (Bowman, 12) (as confirmed by the episode’s writer, Yahlin Chang (S2 E10)), the show fails to include any Latinx actors in the scene. Beyond colorblind casting, which I argue is a means to check off a metaphorical diversity box and boost ratings, the series is not actually representative of racial issues and rather uses people of color as tokens to claim inclusion. The show includes actors of color while simultaneously stripping them of their racial identity. By not complicating the racial situation in Gilead, in that there is no nuanced perspective on racism and it is presented that the inequality there is solely gender and sexuality based, the white woman’s narrative is employed on all female characters. The system of Gilead whose enslavement practices are directly adopted from American racism appropriates the struggles of women of color. While the intent of the showrunners was to demonstrate and create diversity, the lack of a racial narrative not only ignores racial issues, but deepens it. In a world that follows Christian fundamentalism so closely, it would be expected that racial divisions would similarly deepen, as is shown in the novel, rather than become nonexistent per the show.

Moreover from The Handmaid’s Tale specifically, colorblind casting, and the concept of a colorblind world, in general is problematic. As Professor of African American performance Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores in her piece “The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance,” the exploitation of Black bodies for the economic and social gain of white people has been an ever-present transgression since and before slavery entered the United States: “we must address not only the performative effect of certain twice-behaved behaviors in stylizing black bodies to occupy a certain social role, but also the economic imperatives that performance opens up in relation to these black bodies at different moments in history” (Catanese, 2). In other words, the surveillance and use of Black people in terms of both labor and performance, for example slavery and minstrel shows respectively, has been continuously used for economic gain of white people at the expense of Black people.

In discussing Proposition 54, a 2003 California initiative to privatize racial information, an act that would “Implicitly… suggest that race is exclusively a matter of private consciousness, only gaining publicly relevant materiality when and if individuals confess their awareness of one another’s bodily differences” (Catanese, 5). Essentially, it was an act that would censor racial information from being divulged in any public setting. This, however, was inherently problematic in that some individuals do not have the privilege of walking in racial anonymity. Effectively, this created a situation in which “race [was] the unruly chin hair on the face of an otherwise unblemished America” (Catanese, 5). Thus, in this initial move to create a “colorblind” world that pretends not to see race, it assumes that there are no longer racial issues, divides, or marginalizations, a claim that is overtly untrue. According to the Human Rights Watch 2024 World Report, in 2023 “The racial wealth gap remained stark, with Black families having 24 cents and Hispanic families having 23 cents for every US $1 of white family wealth, and has changed very little over the last 50 years.” This is just one of the many examples the HRW provides to prove the perpetuation of racism today. Through the dichotomy between colorblindness and multiculturalism comes the problem of how visible minorities want to be. Catanese argues minorities are only represented at “death of the individual subject… as the price of inclusion in America” (Catanese, 8-9). In other words, in both scenarios, people of color must censor themselves and their realities for the sake of personal safety, and in the process are not being fully represented. They are grouped by category rather than experience. 

An issue with colorblind casting in particular is the implication of a monoracial culture in the United States. It implies a norm and a subversion from it, the latter being the inclusion of people of color, which in turn implies that they are not only still an “other,” but also that they are lower on the power dynamics scale, something that is routinely reinforced when racial issues are ignored in favor of pandering to the larger audience. With colorblind casting comes “‘imagining race as a superficial quality that had to be transcended in order to ascertain the true merits of the actor. Bodies of color that could or would be so easily de-racinated would in fact be at a loss’” (Catanese, 15). This is to say that while Americans try so hard to ignore their racist past, the history of the country created a racial hierarchy in which we all still operate. Thus, by creating colorblind casting, we are erasing the struggles of generations of racial identities; they are “de-racinated.”

The controversy of color-blind casting is not new, and is certainly not limited to The Handmaid’s Tale. To better understand why it was such a detrimental choice to the process of promoting anti-racist theory in the show, it is imperative to explore situations in which color-blind casting is a benign, or even beneficial, influence on a narrative. In 2023, Disney made a live action adaptation of the classic tale The Little Mermaid. Much to director Rob Marshall’s surprise, the casting of an Ariel of color in the form of actress and singer Halle Bailey received an extreme amount of backlash. Investigative journalist Kevin Poloway reports on Marshall’s statement regarding the controversy: “There was no agenda in casting a woman of color… it was really just ‘let’s find the best Ariel.’” In this instance, the race of the character was not important to the plot. While Ariel’s race is irrelevant to The Little Mermaid, controversy arose in an opposite way when the live action adaptation of Disney’s Mulan came out. Many internet commenters argued that Mulan’s character should have been cast without the consideration of race, purposefully ignoring the integral role of China in the narrative, to the extent that the country could arguably be a character in and of itself. In this comparison we see the difference between color-neutral casting and color-ignorant casting; when race and ethnicity are relevant to the narrative it is imperative to cast in accordance.

In the context of The Handmaid’s Tale, the influence of the American slave narrative, as well as the canonic downfall of the United States of America that then turned into Gilead present in the novel, the presence of race is an integral aspect of the story. Catanese argues that “color blindness becomes a fiction that divorces itself from the processes of history” (Catanese, 36). This applies to the show rather than the novel, as the latter acknowledges the nation’s colorful history and consequently erases Black voices from the novel. In addition to erasing history through colorblindness, the inclusion of people of color in a society that realistically would have continued to model itself under the racist paradigm that it was built within. That is to say, as Atwood herself has expressed (she stated The Handmaid’s Tale was in large part influenced by her “study of 17th- and 18th-century America” (Atwood, 2018)) and is proven true under the law in literature model, the gendered hierarchy in Gilead is explicitly based on the American slavery system. Gilead itself was born from a fallen United States, thus institutionalizing the fictionalized nation as a product of our own, real country, including historical and present context. As Catanese explains; “shifting the rhetoric of American discourse to suggest that race is no longer a central feature of public life does little to repair demonstrable race-based inequities. Instead, this strategy simply attempts to eliminate an important vocabulary of analysis, critique, and reform” (Catanese, 36). 

Having established the problematic nature of both the novel and television versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, another line of inquiry arose surrounding the viability of an author telling an intersectional story while only belonging to one or fewer marginalized identity groups. In Atwood’s case, she was raised, socialized, and perceived throughout her life as a white woman, in turn experiencing the sexism and misogyny that comes with femalehood, but none of the racism that comes with being a nonwhite woman. Professor of ethnic studies Jennifer Ann Ho tackles the concept of critical race narratology in her book Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States. Critical race narratology combines critical race theory, which is the study of social and legal racial biases that are implicitly interwoven into Western society, and narrative theory, which is the study of the way narrative structure helps audience perception, to examine the way in which race contributes to an individual’s understanding of the world. Ho is not opposed to white authors writing nonwhite characters; however, she specifies that “when suppositions of correspondences break down, between author and narrative, between race and nation, and among author, narrative, and race” the validity of these stories becomes complicated (Ho, 211). In other words, when an author is telling a story about an identity group that they are not a part of, it is not only imperative but necessary for the narrative to remain authentic.

Film director and Black author Darian Lane explores the subject of white authors depicting characters of color as well. He lists over forty movies and television shows that are written, produced, and directed by white people that have Black main characters. In comparison, there are nearly no white stories told by nonwhite authors. He opines that “gatekeepers [are] systematically preventing Black writers from telling their stories” (Lane, 2021). He says that while it is overall beneficial to have Black characters on the screen, if each respective piece about a person of color that was created by a white person had instead been pitched by a person of the same race as the character, it is more than likely that it would be immediately shot down. This is backed by the fact that only 9% of all film and television producers are Black, and only 6% of directors are Black (according to statistics provided by McKinsey & Company). Lane continues to clarify his statements: “Now there’s nothing wrong with non-Mexican or non-Blacks writing about the plight of Blacks or Mexicans. What’s wrong is erasing authentic voices to sell an inaccurate cultural appropriation for millions.” That is exactly what is happening in The Handmaid’s Tale. In both the novel and television versions of the story, voices of color are erased, via expulsion and neglect respectively. 

The issue of race in narrative theory is one becoming increasingly relevant. Narrative theory is intrinsically intersectional, as it draws upon “such fields as rhetoric, (socio)linguistics, philosophical ethics, cognitive science (including cognitive and social psychology), folklore, and gender theory” and more, as according to The Ohio State University’s definition of the subject. Combining Ho and Lane’s explorations with this definition, it can confidently be concluded that “race matters—it matters as a representation of reality, as a hermeneutics of narrative, and as a sociohistorical element that has aesthetic and narratological significance” (Ho, 213) in relation to narrative storytelling. Christoffersen and Emejulu contribute to this argument as well as they address the intersectional concept of “racialized sexism:” “When race and gender are conceptualized as separate and independent from each other there is a tendency for the most powerful members of marginalized groups, in this case, white women and Black men —to universalize themselves and their particular experiences” (Christoffersen, Emejulu, introduction). This applies directly to narrative theory. Anyone outside of the most marginalized group cannot appropriately tell their lived experiences because they “position themselves as the only legitimate representatives of the group as a whole” (Christoffersen, Emejulu, introduction). Thus, it is impossible to tell an entirely antiracist narrative as a white author without consulting voices of color to establish authenticity.

While both versions of The Handmaid’s Tale portray race in conjunction with gender in a problematic manner, the Hulu series drastically undermines Atwood’s original anti-racist perspective. However, despite Atwood’s attempts to acknowledge the racist history from which the Gileadean system in The Handmaid’s Tale is based on, she nevertheless becomes complicit in institutionalized racism because of her position as a white woman. It is altogether impossible to tell the story of marginalized peoples based on racialized oppression as someone who has not experienced racial discrimination without consulting someone who has to ensure authenticity.

Works Cited/ Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Bowman, Kayla. In/Visibilizing Race: The “Colorblind” Problem of Public Policy Representation in The Handmaid’s Tale. UC Boulder, 2020.

Kayla Bowman problematizes the feminism in The Handmaid’s Tale, addressing the influence of white feminism, that is feminism that ignores intersectionality and the reality of the increased oppression that women of color face, as well as complicating the concept of “colorblindness.” This thesis paper helped me frame my argument and provided insight into different definitions of feminism, and the inseparability of the history of American slavery as an influence on the structure of Gilead. This article introduced me to the concept of “law in literature,” a concept prominent in literary analysis for its relevance and the way it explicates the reality-based legal structures that exist in fiction. Overall, In/Visibilizing Race: The “Colorblind” Problem of Public Policy Representation in The Handmaid’s Tale helped shape what was initially just a question– what is the implication and relevance of race in The Handmaid’s Tale?– into an argument, as she solidifies the problem of white voices speaking over voices of color, and she helped me connect a fictional piece to the complicated gender politics of the world in which we live in today. 

CATANESE, BRANDI WILKINS. The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2011. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.368267. Accessed 20 Mar. 2024.

In her essay The Problem of the Color[Blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance, Brandi Wilkins Catanese explores the definition of colorblindness and explains why it is a problematic concept to subscribe to. She says that, while many “colorblind” efforts are done under the guise of being anti-racist, in that its original goal is to not see color therefore implying that everyone is equal, in reality colorblindness “de-racinates” populations and ignores the systemic, race-based inequalities that are omnipresent across the world, and especially in the United States. This applies to my essay in the context of criticism of the television series and their inclusion of people of color in Gilead, and the subsequent ignorance of their marginalized lived realities. After reading this article, I was inspired to do further research on the implications of colorblindness, and in the process discovered more problems that arise in the show regarding race, such as the negligence to acknowledge Black women’s increased maternal mortality rates.

Ashlee Christoffersen, Akwugo Emejulu, “Diversity Within”: The Problems with “Intersectional” White Feminism in Practice, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 2023, Pages 630–653

This essay by scholars Ashlee Christoffersen and Akwugo Emejulu covers the concept of intersectionality and the double marginalization that Black women in the United States experience. By reading and applying this essay to my own research, I was able to expand on the problematic nature of colorblind casting by coming to the conclusion that the biggest compilation that arises under it is the implication that whiteness is the norm, and everything else is a contradiction to it. This essay also explores the extremely complicated issue that is white authors telling stories about nonwhite people, something that is not present in Atwood’s original The Handmaid’s Tale, but is prominent in the television series. This essay also allowed me to complicate Atwood’s perspective on whiteness as well, as although she does not include people of color in her world, and therefore is not speaking for them, she is simultaneously erasing their voices and thus becomes complicit in the racist structure in which she is writing.

Chenault, John. “Western Christianity and the origins of antiblackness, Eurocentrism, and white supremacist ideology.” The University of Louisville’s Institutional Repository, May 2022, https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/3835. 

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Random House UK, 1985. 

Atwood, Margaret. The Testaments. Vintage, 2019.

Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literary hub, 2018, https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-how-she-came-to-write-the-handmaids-tale/

“‘little Mermaid’ Director, Cast Address Colorblind Casting and the Power of a Black Ariel.” Yahoo!,Yahoo!,www.yahoo.com/entertainment/little-mermaid-new-ariel-halle-bailey-interview-disney-remake-171141213.html. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024. 

“What Is Narrative Theory?” What Is Narrative Theory? | Project Narrative, projectnarrative.osu.edu/about/what-is-narrative-theory. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024. 

Owens, Deirdre Cooper, and Sharla M. Fett. “Black maternal and infant health: Historical legacies of slavery.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 109, no. 10, Oct. 2019, pp. 1342–1345, https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2019.305243. 

“What Is Anti-Racism?” What Is Anti-Racism? | Community Service Center, http://www.bu.edu/csc/edref-2/antiracism/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2024. 

Luo, Michael. “American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem.” The New Yorker, 2 Sept. 2020, http://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/american-christianitys-white-supremacy-problem. 

HO, JENNIFER ANN. “After word.” Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, 16 Oct. 2017, pp. 208–218, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16gff4t.19. 

Owens, Deirdre Cooper, and Sharla M. Fett. “Black maternal and infant health: Historical legacies of slavery.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 109, no. 10, Oct. 2019, pp. 1342–1345, https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2019.305243. 

“World Report 2024: Rights Trends in United States.” Human Rights Watch, 11 Jan. 2024, http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/united-states.