White Man's Cotton

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

In the near future, a committee of influential African-Americans meets
in secret to decide the fate of racist Euro-Americans. Selected for
their crimes against the black race, the chosen offenders are hunted
down by a “homicidal black male” known only as the Catcher. Leaving
a trail of innocent white victims in his path, the Catcher binds the
chosen ones and has them transported to a secret location, where they
are imprisoned underground, brutalized, and forced to pick mushrooms, or
“white man’s cotton,” from beds surrounded by razor wire. The
prisoners experience a catalogue of horrors, including starvation,
beatings, sexual abuse, and the attentions of an insatiable man-eating
crocodile. Among the lawyers and businessmen who evade human-rights
laws, Klan members, racist cops, and other offenders is Lance Forrest,
an ordinary, non-racist white man who has been mistakenly captured in
the place of his vilely racist cousin.

While White Man’s Cotton has an interesting premise, it is clumsily
written and full of ham-fisted symbolism: the members of the secret
society of African-Americans bear names like Oprah Truville, Skekwan
Farrakhan, and Larsen Black (a jewel thief); a Klan patriarch is named
Don Snow; the white slaves are rescued by a vessel christened The Angel
White. This clumsiness eventually becomes downright offensive: although
the author’s stated purpose is to affirm “the equality of all
individuals” and to show “that hatred and injustice are wrong,
regardless of their motivations,” the book is full of stereotypes.
Black men are depicted as big, brutal truncheon-wielding monsters. The
captured Euro-Americans mouth racial slurs but are really objects of
sympathy, since they are no match for their captors, who come across as
inhuman.

“Mother Nature’s colors blended so well together,” thinks the
hero at the end of the novel, “[i]t’s such a shame that the rest of
the world didn’t catch on.” The real shame here is not this final
sentiment but the fact that this novel airs vile stereotypes that many
have tried so desperately to expunge from the North American psyche.