Master Harold

Racist Attitudes and Their Influences in ?Master Harold? ? and the boys

We have all heard the saying that the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer. This somewhat describes South Africa in the 1950s. During this time in Africa, the white people kept getting more powerful while the black population kept getting weaker. South Africa?s apartheid system gave powerful odds to the whites and created a racist society. In ?Master Harold? ? and the boys, a book set around the 1950s and during the apartheid system, the racist attitudes from the apartheid system and Hally?s parents affected how Hally treated Sam and Willie, who are black and work for Hally?s mother. These attitudes over-shadowed the good relationship Sam and Hally had built through most of Hally?s childhood.

?Apartheid was a system that deliberately set out to humiliate black people, even to the point of relegating them to separate benches, entails the danger of habitual indifference to the everyday detail that shape black and white relationship and finally, perverts them.? (Durbach 69). South Africa passed laws and acts making the black people?s lives degrading and ensured the white superiority. Four laws were passed in 1950 which included the

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Sam realized this when Hally told him the joke and ended up spitting on Sam?s face. The whites made themselves more powerful by making the blacks feel inferior. Sam soon became a better father figure to Hally than his own real father.

The most important influence on a child is its parents. He shows how society can be cruel and ugly to the blacks. Hally failed to take the higher road of manhood and both he and Sam did not beat the odds. Hally tells Sam in reference to Hally?s father, ?He?s a white man and that?s good enough for you. He wanted to provide him with a true vision about what society should be like. If Sam had not been part of his