Racism

A sense of racial tension runs throughout the novel alongside the feminist issues dealt with. Celie is the daughter of a successful Negro store owner, lynched by white men for no other reason than his financial success. All the characters in Celie's family and the extended family she comes into contact with through Shug and her husband's children are the poor exploited blacks of the American South. Even the poorest of the whites consider themselves superior to any black, no matter how successful. The story of Sofia is the main episode in the novel which illustrates the hazards of being black in Georgia in the thirties (and later) Sofia is spirited and strong, assertive and independent and yet she is reduced to total helplessness when she dares to answer back to the mayor's wife - a spineless creature who is herself as weak as Sofia is strong. Sofia refuses to be patronised. She makes the mistake of "looking like somebody" - driving in a car, an unusual thing in those days for anyone, let alone a black woman and replying to the mayor's wife's offer of menial work with a "Hell, no" The beating she receives is out of all proportion to the offence she committed but the white ruling class shows no mercy to an "uppity nigger".

In the character of Eleanor Jane, Alice Walker manages to show that it is possible for black and white to mend relationships and begin to understand and accept one another. By the end of the novel Eleanor Jane and Sofia are able to relate like equal women rather than black servant and mistress, but only after Sofia has been brutally honest with the younger woman about the reality of the way she feels about her and her child. Eleanor Jane begins to realise that Sofia is a woman, not a faceless black person like all the rest of her race and even turns on her own parents, demanding to know how a woman like Sofia could work for "trash". The main point to note about the racial prejudice shown by whites to blacks is that it is very often unconscious and all the more insidious because of that.