On Race and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

by Max S. Gordon

(this piece was originally published on May 24, 2017)

“We lived as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I get how it can be news to some of you that people are victimized by systems legitimated by your nation, countrymen, and god. But I’m black and female and southern. I call that Tuesday.” –Tressie McMillan Cottom

(This essay contains spoilers up to Season 1, Episode 7 of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale)

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I first read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in college for a class on feminist writers. From the very first paragraph, the novel was overpowering for me as a black, gay man; Atwood’s novel is about many things, but what struck me most was one theme, and I don’t think I’ve been able to articulate it fully until now: The Handmaid’s Tale is about an American white woman “nigger-ed” by the society that has betrayed her. The most obvious take on the book, of course, is that Offred is dealing with a sexist, patriarchal society run amok. But Offred also wakes up to a changed world and has to negotiate “whiteness” for the first time in her life, and I empathized with her because, at the university campus I attended, I was negotiating a fair amount of…