Racism rather the sexism in The Handmaid's Tale

What is the benefit of looking at a 1980s work of speculative fiction by a Canadian author through the lens of a 21st-century primarily-US-based political movement, exactly?

"Atwood makes no comment on this" - you can't even distinguish between the narrator of a novel and its author. Your politics may be well-intentioned, but your literary analysis falls down at this basic hurdle.

Just because she doesn’t tow the GC feminist line, don’t now accuse her of racism or erase her.
I personally do not see the racist line in HT. if anything it is a cautionary tale about racism as well as the patriarchal agenda.

Nah, I'm as disappointed as anyone to see the gender neutral bollocks she put on twitter, but the stuff she put in the HT happened in all sorts of communities and countries. The horrifying thing about them is that they were real. POC were shipped off and othered - that's part of the story.

Besides, she's Canadian. The early European settlers did unspeakable things to the indigenous people, I'm fairly confident she's aware of that and that is why POC are conspicuous by their absence - it's a comment on racism.

It's a while since I've read it and I haven't bothered with the TV dramatisation, but to me the implication was that anyone non-white had been expelled from Gilead.

It's a misogynist and racist dystopia. If you look at it through the lens of BLM, surely that's the same as the feminist one: is this genuinely a potential future America could face? How do we solve the social issues that could lead to this?

In the final chapter of the book (the Historical Notes) Atwood suggests that Native Americans are leading academic institutions and one of the other speakers is from India. She is imagining in the future a more sophisticated, diverse community than Gilead. But I don't think that's the main point of the novel.

A theocracy that subjugates women, making them the property of men, forcing them to cover their bodies and prevents them from leaving the house without the permission of the man they belong to?

No, doesn't sound at all likely.

Why should she have 'curiosity' about the white supremacy of Gilead? She wasn't writing a text book or factual historical thesis on the narrative. BAME women were 'excluded from the narrative' because they were excluded from Gilead. If they didn't exist in Offred's narrow world why would they be written about?

It would be clunky and a disservice to write something like 'I wonder where all the black people went?' thought Offred. 'I haven't seen Mrs since I became a handmaid'.

Atwood put nothing into the book that hasn't happened somewhere iirc.

So it's a kind of plaiting of threads that have already existed and extrapolating from that. She calls herself a speculative fiction writer iirc.

I dont really think we need to get bogged down with vampires!

IME this book does not stand up to scrutiny through the lens of BLM

That's probably the stupidest criteria I've ever seen applied to a novel that's not about race.

I don't remember anything about only white women being effected by the infertility plague

I think in the (fictional) historical note at the end it's stated that more modern science suggests the falling fertility rates were in the men all along.
So no women - of any colour - were actually affected. But the men decided who to ship off and who to keep enslaved based on their own bad science and prejudices.
The children of Ham thing is just another layer of exposing these men's fear and inadequacy - blaming everyone but themselves, getting rid of anyone not like them, scrabbling to stay at the top no matter what the cost. It isn't Offred's overriding concern, she has pretty serious shit to deal with of her own - the fact that her mother has been sent to work in the radioactive zone only gets a glancing mention, but it is another layer the author adds which the reader can pick up on to flesh out the hypocrisy and paranoia of Gilead. More is going on than what we see - but this is Offred's story (literally the title of the book) so we only get her narrow POV in any detail.

I don’t think black authors often, if ever, create characters where race is not explicit. Black and ethnic minority writers are well aware that the race of a person is fundamental to their experiences and the way other people respond to them. If white writers do this then it probably shows their naivety.

Margaret Atwood wrote a book in which Black people are not seen because they’d been victims of a nameless atrocity by an unspeakable regime. No Black people were deprived of a job by that artistic choice.

Once you decide to dramatise the novel in a huge big budget TV series then sticking to that aspect of the plot means saying “no BAME actors need apply”, so it becomes a choice which financially disadvantages actual human POC in a tangible way. If Atwood had insisted as the creator that they stuck to an all white cast to preserve a fairly minor aspect of her novel at the expense of giving non-white actors a fair share of the jobs then I’d have been prepared to have a go at her, but she did no such thing.

In older Chrsitian art, for example, before people became less parochial and historically aware, you tended to see Jesus depicted as black in African art, Asian in Asian art, and European in European art.

But vampires arent real- but misogyny really is a monster which needs to clubbed down continuously.

You know what gets me? The millions of daft women in the world who behave as if this fictitious story is actually real. It is FICTION. You might as well watch Twilight.

I guess most black authors imagine most of their characters as black when they write them, and most Asian writers probably imagine most of their characters as Asian?

Through this prism, I felt very uncomfortable when acknowledging her lack of curiosity about the white supremacy aspect of Gilead, and the implication that experience of white women was the universal female experience, whilst Black women were ignored and excluded from the narrative.

She has never claimed that the Handmaid's Tale is the definitive book on women in a dystopian future.

I always think that book characters could be any colour except when something is described that makes their skin colour obvious. But I don't have an imagination (I mean I don't imagine things in my head) so maybe that's why I don't see it. In the handmaids tale I really don't remember that everyone was white but it seems like it was mentioned and I've missed or forgotten it.

IME this book does not stand up to scrutiny through the lens of BLM
I find that such a sad and terrifying statement. Are BLM starting a list of prohibited books on the lines of the Vatican's Index of forbidden books?

I agree, but my point is that MA didn't have such qualms about writing an entirely white cast. I reread the book after watching the first series of the TV adaptation and having read some criticisms of the colourblind casting. Through this prism, I felt very uncomfortable when acknowledging her lack of curiosity about the white supremacy aspect of Gilead, and the implication that experience of white women was the universal female experience, whilst Black women were ignored and excluded from the narrative.

I think you are talking about some book that MA hasn't written.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a book where all or most characters are of one ethnicity.

I don’t think the all white cast in the book means the book is racist. The narrator lives in a narrow, racially segregated world. We can hold on mind the circumstances and Atwood maybe is correct in not speaking for black women.

Race is a problem for many literary adaptations as books by white authors rarely feature non white characters and so we often see a few black people hanging around in the background or cast in minor roles where their ethnicity never needs to be addressed.

I think it's ok for a writer to take one theme and run with it.
The narrator was speaking about her situation.
I think that's ok.

Atwood clearly doesnt condone racism, or the environmental damage that led to this. Just that they are taking place off the page.

Its Offreds story.