Big Black Good Man

On its face, this short story is about one man’s engagement with blackness and all the negative associations with blackness in Western culture. The story can be read as an allegory about race and racism and how much of a challenge racism is to Western notions about the rationality of man.

Olaf stands in for whiteness as it is imagined in Western culture. On the surface, Olaf has a tolerant, laissez-faire attitude toward people of other races. He believes he has no problem serving and working alongside people of color at the start of the story. Olaf’s encounter with Jim reveals the limitations of this apparent tolerance and highlights the irrationality at the root of Western attitudes about race and thus of Western racial attitudes. The terms Olaf uses to describe Jim are drawn straight from the white supremacist lexicon. When Olaf first sees Jim, he uses “huge black thing” (Paragraph 4), “it” (Paragraph 6), having a “buffalo like head” (Paragraph 6), and other descriptors that erase all recognizable human traits in favor of objectifying terms related to Jim’s blackness and size. Olaf's own reactions—racing thoughts, anger, intense emotions, violent fantasies, and wetting himself—show that Olaf's feelings about blackness are anything but governed by his reason.