Moby Dick

For all the talk of Melville’s progressive (or not so progressive) stance on race, few have questioned the category of race itself. Melville and his narrator, Ishmael, have varying responses to the “cannibals” at different points in the text. Their responses range from outright terror—“had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than I ever bolted a dinner (Melville 21)”—to patronizing, “these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvelous how essentially polite they are (Melville 27),” almost as if Ishmael were talking about a small child who had learned to say “please” and “thank you.” On either end of the spectrum of responses, Queequeg is clearly not the same as Ishmael, and his racial otherness characterizes his difference.
At one point in the text, Melville attempts to moralize on race relations for his audience, via Ishmael’s realization that “ignorance is the parent of fear (21).” Melville’s superficial attempts at moralizing on peace and serenity between races belies his work on the project of reaffirming both whiteness and the category of race itself. Race, on this liberal arts campus, is commonly discussed as a construct, and Melville’s text illustrates how individuals build race as a category, normalizing whiteness and casting those with different skin colors as a different race.
Ishmael almost constantly reaffirms whiteness as the default, in his first meeting with Queequeg, assuming that he is simply a tan white man who had traveled to New Zealand and received their tribal tattoos. He didn’t realize that Queequeg was not a white man until he saw him practicing his worship, exposed his hair knot, the extensive full-body tattoo covering Queequeg’s “purple” skin. Melville never speaks openly of “race,” but by spending excessive time describing and exoticizing Queequeg, Melville reaffirms whiteness as the default (and therefore unworthy of long descriptions). Setting whiteness as the default sets up racial relations to consider “whites” as superior to others, and whiteness has become a constant project of keeping itself in the default position by subjugating and dominating other “races.”
The project of constructing race and keeping whiteness as the default relies on the sorts of markers Ishmael uses to mark Queequeg as a “savage.” These racially-coded features would have resonated with Melville’s audience, clearly delineating Queequeg as “other,” without ever outright saying that he is of a different race. Seemingly arbitrary markers such as these are the code by which we read and interpret race, and the invisibility of these markers allow the project of whiteness to become normalized and shielded from critical analysis.

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