The Twisted Priorities of a White Nation
While reading the short story "The Comet" by W.E.B. Du Bois, there is a lesson learned fairly quickly. That a nation or a people that prioritizes white as the superior race will continue to see that to the end. Du Bois utilizes his short story to comment on an unnatural type of hatred, racism. His short story tells of a white woman and a black man, Jim, who seem to be the last two people alive after everyone else was wiped out. At the end of the story, the reader learns that only that city was killed off, and the white woman, Julia, gets saved by her dad and other men who first shared an instinct of 'othering.' A man who stayed by her side and saved her immediately became a threat after reality set back in and the structures of a society settled back into place. Her father and the other men waiting outside to hear of the news of survivors fell straight back into the order and structure of racism. They assumed the worst and assumed he could have only caused this white woman harm solely because of his skin color.
White supremacy reveals itself here. When the world is seemingly ending, why is death not the scariest thing on the minds of these men? Why is the mass amounts of bodies in the streets not the first concern? Why is the fact that two people survived not enough? These are the twisted priorities of a White Nation. A nation fears the black man more than it fears death itself. It took the white woman in the story to be a mediator between her father and the man who saved her. She had to tell them he saved her. His words would never be enough. She bridged some type of gap between the ideals of yesterday and the ideals of that present moment. She now saw that this man, whether black or not, and even though she had doubts, saved her. He saved her without resolution. Part of her felt that what she knew and what she had been taught was wrong. I think the real horror of this story though is that the fate of Jim rested within the hands of a white woman. During this time, a white woman did not carry much respect in comparison to the white male; however, her truth would mean more at the end of the day than a man because that man was black. That is white supremacy in action. The picking and choosing of who holds authority, who holds control.
