Theme Of Racism In The Secret Life Of Bees

From the beginning, the reader can clearly distinguish the main theme of racism in The Secret Life of Bees. Kidd first introduces racism in Chapter One when three white men insult Rosaleen on her way to town to register to vote. Lily says of the attack that follows, “They lunged at her...Rosaleen lay sprawled on the ground, pinned, twisting her fingers around clumps of grass. Blood ran from a cut beneath her eye,” (33). Racial violence did indeed run rampant during the 1960s, and attacks like Rosaleen’s happened often as whites struggled to suppress black voting freedoms. Though Kidd’s upbringing could have molded her into a racist herself, she refused to allow it and instead expresses her opposition through writing. Throughout the novel,

Lily begins to discover her true feelings about racism and the world she grows up in. After watching her black best friend get arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, she describes her epiphany about race, “...it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets...It seemed to me it would have been better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether,” (154-155). She then goes on to propose a solution that goes right to the heart of the novel, “Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan,” (209). A simple statement, voiced by a naïve fourteen year old girl, reveals the true message of the novel. Kidd’s argues that skin color is so inconsequential that it could be deleted altogether. Though an excellent solution to a problem that should not have occurred in the first place, the absence of skin color is impractical. Diversity not only allows people to be human, but it also protects them from harm and susceptibility. In the end people are human, and human nature will always prevail in the case of right and wrong. After all, “There is nothing perfect...There is only life,” (256).