Select a passage from your text that you think is particularly relevant to your chosen Lens and integrate it into your own writing. (Cognitive Skill: Integration of Evidence)

"[A]nybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean." Chapter 26

This passage and most of the narrative throughout Beloved attempts to show the obvious social differences and separation that whites and blacks experienced during this time in American history. Here, Morrison explains in detail how much the whites made the blacks feel different, and more importantly, like less. They were constantly degraded. Through looking closely at this quote through a Marxist lens, it is clear and bluntly stated that black people in the slave class were nothing but ground that they walk on, the lowest of the low. Having never received any kindness or respect from the upper class whites, the only thing Sethe can possibly protect from the pain, humiliation, and constant degradation are her children, since she has already been “dirtied.”  At this point she has already been beaten down, treated like an animal, and taken advantage of physically. She knows that she or any other African American could not do anything to stop this social norm, because the whites constantly stripped away everything that made the Africans human so that in the end they barely could consider themselves human. This is why she chooses not to fight it, but accept that she has been abused by the social system already and now only wants to protect her beloved children from experience the same kind of shame and dehumanizing.

First and foremost, this passage shows the huge social difference that the slaves and whites experienced as a result of the enslavement and dehumanization of the blacks in America. The only purpose that the blacks served in society was to be a source of labor for the whites; the blacks were owned like objects and stripped away from all that makes them human. By making them for work hours on end, day after day with no hope of becoming more than a piece of property, many slaves felt like their life had no meaning. Therefore, this social structure made it so that their only hope for freedom of themselves was in death, whether by their masters or themselves. This is very relevant to the Marxist lens in that it shows exploitation of a majority group, by the higher or dominant class which in this case is the slave-owning whites. It also shows the extreme conditions that formed an oppressed slave population which eventually, as Marxism says, would revolt through their struggle, which we know historically is what happened. This quote shows the severe mental condition that slaves lived in that deeply separated them from the upper class, a theme that comes up throughout Beloved, making them feel inhuman so much that they wished death on anyone who might experience it, while the upper class would do anything to keep their free labor alive and captured.