When Margaret Atwood published in The Handmaid’s Tale it quickly became a seminal feminist text. It largely dealt the United States becoming a fascist patriarchal, white, Christian fundamentalist country. To that end, in the original narrative, people of colour were sent to live in the colonies, and Jews were given the opportunity to emigrate to Israel because they were viewed as people of the book but certainly not white. In its updated version, Hulu has chosen to make some changes in order to make the story more inclusive. By today’s standards creating a television show without people of colour would certainly be deemed by many progressives to be problematic. To that end, several characters in the book who were originally white: Moira, Luke and Nick are now being portrayed by people of colour.
To be clear, I absolutely love Samira Wiley and think that she’s a brilliant actress but changing Moira from Black to White should not have been done without some kind of interrogation of race. Luke and Offred had an interracial relationship before the rise of Gilead and yet, the only issue they seem to debate is gender. It’s not possible to have a mixed race relationship without having ongoing conversations regarding white supremacy and racial privilege. Nick we are told is considered a man of low status - so low in fact that he has not been accorded a woman. Nick’s status is framed as being about class rather than the fact that he’s clearly of Asian descent. Each and every update has been devoid of any critical race theory or even cultural identity specific to people of colour. It reads as inclusion for inclusion's sake - or tokenism - to avoid charges of erasure.
The Handmaid’s Tale reflects a lot on the oppression encouraged and championed by the Religious Right. It serves not just as a Dystopia, but also as a definite cautionary tale - which has only become more relevant in the last few years. But the history of the religious right is not just a misogynist and homophobic one - it’s also very much a racist one. One of the first - perhaps the first - championed cause that launched the religious right was not abortion - it was segregation - as in fighting to protect it against “government interference” not trying to defeat it. White oppressive Fundamentalist Christianity has most definitely had a hefty stamp of racism from its very beginning - it beggars belief that this underpinning prejudice will magically disappear.
You simply cannot separate the Christian faith from racism. In the name of Christ, Christians have colonised, murdered and terrorised people of colour. While there hasn’t always been unity of thought, because the bible was as both a justification for slavery and a reason for why it should be abolished, it serves as evidence of the ways in which faith has often been the underpinnings of racialised terrorism. Even those who wanted to bring an end to slavery, most certainly didn’t see Blacks as the equal of whites. When Catholic priests and nuns were beating, starving and raping Indigenous people in residential schools, they did so with one eye on the cross. Christianity has always been part of the justification in order to deny the true agenda of White supremacy - the absolute subjugation of all people of colour at any cost. So desperate were White Christians to make God in their image they made a Palestinian Jew White. The blue eyed, blonde haired Jesus is a figment of the imagination much like the idea a supposedly benign Christianity.
One excuse for why racism isn’t present in Gilead is that fertility trumps everything. The central motivator to the US descending into Gilead is the fertility crisis - more and more people are unable to have children. The argument is that Gilead is desperate to have any children, regardless of race.
