White’s Racism Faced by Afro-Americans Depicted in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Thesis. English Letters and Language Department. Humanities and Culture Faculty. The State Islamic University of Malang.

ABSTRACT

Racism is an interesting topic to be analyzed because racism is an ancient problem with no solution to avoid and reduce it. Although in this modern era, racism can also be found in some aspects in our life and it becomes more complicated. There are many social phenomena in the United States especially in South Carolina in 1964 that occurred caused by racial differences and inequality between the Whites and the Afro-Americans that result the Whites’ racism against Afro-Americans. And Sue Monk Kidd is one of the authors who choose this problem for her novel entitled The Secret Life of Bees.

Based on the background of the study above, the problems of my thesis are the first is what are the forms of White’s racism faced by Afro-Americans depicted in Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees? And the second, what are the struggles of Afro-Americans against White’s racism depicted in Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees? The third is how does White’s racism faced by Afro-Americans in Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees revealing the real society of South Carolina in 1964?

This research is categorized as literary criticism since the researcher conduct the interpretation and analysis on a literary work. The researcher uses genetic structuralism theory in doing the analysis because in this analysis, the researcher sees the literary work from two points of views, namely intrinsic and extrinsic and connect directly the phenomena from that period of the literary works are created to the intrinsic elements of the literary work it self.

After analyzing the data, the researcher found the forms of Whites’ racism faced by the Afro-Americans namely: prejudice, segregation, discrimination, extermination, and expulsion while the Afro-Americans’ struggles appear to oppose the Whites’ racism. And all the data that are found by the researcher reflect the real society and the condition of South Carolina in 1964 where there were many Afro-Americans were discriminated by the Whites and they did not get their human rights. They also try to maintain the Civil Rights Act to get the equality between the Whites and the Afro-Americans.