Native Tribes

Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian deals with racial discrimination in the form of The opines attitude toward the orphans, the tangible efforts of the gang to be more savage, and even in the Kids role in the border skirmishes between the American settlers, the inherent Americans and Mexicans living along the border. In a bracing that some suck called the greatest American novel since Moby Dick, McCarthy discusses racism on an inherent level, making people study the historical context and the situation itself. Remarkably, the novel has a lasting approach as a commentary on the way Americans address their southerly neighbors even today.The first evidence of racism the book offers is in the Judges attitude towards the orphans. The Judge is a pedophile, raping the orphans and then killing them or having them killed to hide his indiscretion. In his mind, the Judge justifies his actions with the thought that many of the children in the orphanhood are half-breeds and somehow therefor e less important than people who are purely Caucasian. In his mind, the Judge and others who look after the orphans, even as want merely as the Judge does, are doing their Christian duty and providing for children that are otherwise unwanted.In this way, the book takes a hard and accurate look at the racism that was prevalent in the West regarding children descended from Native Americans and Europeans. The children were dismissed by white society as half savage and by the Native populations because they often represented the humiliation of one of the women of the tribeeither voluntarily or involuntarily. To some extent, these children were more accepted in the Native populations when their parents were twain accepted by the tribe, but even then they were mostly back up class citizens.The next evidence of racism and its extreme application comes from the Gang. though the gang is composed of outlaws of Caucasian and Native descent, as a kernel of instilling terror in their victims, the gang resorts to scalping those they killed. As history demonstrates, only a very small number of Native Tribes took scalps as tally coup, but the stereotype of the novel and of the gang members was that Injuns took scalps and that would suck up people more afraid of them. It is also interesting to note that unproblematic targets of the gang were settlers coming up from Mexico or those of Latino descent.The stereotype that the Mexican were outlaws or lazy ot somehow second-class citizens is prevalent in the novel. perchance equally interesting in the long-term is the prejudice within the Hispanic/Mexican/Chicano community itself. Even now, those who are descendents of the Spanish Conquistadors are sometimes offended by being identified as Mexicans, whom they identify as those of mixed blood between the conquistadors and the Native American people of interchange America. However, Chicanos in Southern California would be equally offended by being called a Hispanic as they ta ke pride in their connection to Mexico.The fact that this racism persists to this day is both interesting and demoralise at the same time. The simple reality of Cormac McCarthys novel is that it portrays an lousiness man attempting to justify his actions via racism and a gang of thugs using racism to bind themselves seem bigger and badder than they are, when in truth murder should have been enough. McCarthys ability to capture the tenor and reality of the racism without pandering to it does make this a novel worth reading.