Apartheid

Apartheid is invoked in American Psycho as part of Patrick Bateman’s supposedly comprehensive account of the world’s political and social emergencies. Its decisive significance lies less in any sustained discussion of South African racial rule than in the brutal contradiction between Bateman’s public vocabulary of justice and the racialized, class-bound violence through which he actually perceives and treats other people.

Political Invocation

During dinner, Patrick Bateman presents the end of apartheid as the first item in a sweeping list of international obligations. He places it beside slowing the nuclear arms race, stopping terrorism and world hunger, preventing the spread of communism in Central America, pursuing a Middle East peace settlement, and preventing United States military involvement overseas. The list continues through national defense and America’s status as a respected world power, giving the reference to apartheid the appearance of a considered position within a complete foreign-policy platform.

The speech is delivered as an effort to sound informed, responsible, and politically serious. Bateman moves rapidly from international affairs to domestic problems, economic policy, education, crime, Social Security, environmental damage, and the AIDS epidemic. His language therefore turns apartheid into one component of an encyclopedic performance of concern: a phrase that helps establish the speaker’s breadth without requiring sustained knowledge, personal risk, or action.

The Dinner-Table Performance

The setting makes the political statement inseparable from social display. Bateman speaks at a fashionable dinner while the table responds with uncomfortable silence; Timothy Price reacts with bemused disbelief, Courtney smiles as though pleased, and Evelyn becomes mystified by the direction of the conversation before offering exotic sorbet flavors in a dazed monotone. The scene treats political seriousness as another form of dinner-table styling, adjacent to clothing, restaurants, alcohol, and etiquette.

Bateman’s rhetoric also appears alongside the group’s casual contempt for anyone who fails to fit its polished social code. Stash, whose unfashionable hair, ill-fitting black clothes, and lack of financial status make him visibly alien at the table, is reduced to an object of class judgment before he announces that the sushi moved. The episode does not establish a direct equivalence between Stash’s treatment and apartheid, but it places Bateman’s anti-apartheid language within a social world that habitually ranks bodies, accents, clothes, wealth, and belonging.

Contradiction in the City

The political ideal of opposing racial domination is sharply undercut by Bateman’s movement through New York City. In a cab leaving Wall Street, he notices blood-red graffiti reading "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" before a bus advertisement for Les Misérables blocks his view. The city’s surfaces repeatedly turn social crisis into fleeting spectacle: graffiti, advertisements, traffic, and branded urban movement replace sustained attention.

Outside Pastels, after the group divides a $475 check and leaves an undrunk bottle of champagne behind, a different homeless man asks first for change and then, more hopefully, for food. Bateman answers by criticizing the man’s appearance, while Timothy Price suggests throwing him a tie. The scene follows Bateman’s stated commitment to social concern with an immediate demonstration of indifference toward poverty. His political vocabulary can name structural injustice, yet his social reflex is to convert deprivation into ridicule.

The same pattern governs Bateman’s encounters with race and public space. Walking through the antique district below Fourteenth Street, he observes Black men offering crack or hustling party tickets, then later sees a Black homeless man lying in a doorway beside a shopping cart marked with a handwritten plea for help. The cart contains newspapers, bottles, and aluminum cans; a thin dog named Gizmo lies beside its owner, tied to the cart and guarding him. These details give material form to the people whom Bateman’s dinner speech claims should receive food and shelter, while his gaze treats them as scenery within a city organized by wealth, consumption, and exclusion.

Violence Against the Excluded

Bateman’s encounter with the homeless man and Gizmo culminates in extreme violence. He kills the dog with a serrated knife, attacks its owner, slashes his throat, and shoots him twice in the face before leaving. The episode converts the abstract language of social protection into its grotesque opposite: the person most clearly identified as hungry and homeless receives no recognition as a political subject, only exposure to arbitrary private violence.

The later image of a blinded Vietnam veteran on Fifth Avenue extends this pattern. Near Central Park, Bateman recognizes a beggar whose face he has scarred and whose sign identifies him as a blinded veteran asking for help for himself and his dog. The man’s disability, military history, hunger, and homelessness are compressed into a sign that passersby may read without necessarily seeing the person. Bateman’s prior violence has made that reduction literal: the victim’s loss of sight becomes part of a public spectacle that permits the surrounding city to continue moving.

Racialized and Animalized Perception

The text presents Bateman’s consciousness as saturated with racial and homophobic slurs and with a habit of describing people through bodily defects, social rank, or perceived usefulness. That language does not merely accompany the violence; it prepares a hierarchy in which certain people can be treated as less than fully human. The homeless man is surrounded by garbage and alcohol, while Gizmo is noticed only after Bateman circles back, and both are then handled as disposable bodies.

Animals repeatedly occupy the same field of watching and control. At the Central Park Zoo, Bateman sees a custodian, dealers, spectators, birds, seals, and penguins through a hostile, estranging gaze. In the penguin habitat, the animals appear tired and stressed beneath artificial noises and the crowd’s gaze; Bateman identifies one penguin as resembling Craig McDermott before crouching behind a trash can and approaching a child. In his apartment, a large rat emerges from the toilet and is drawn toward leftover pizza, while Bateman traps it, struggles to contain it, and imagines torturing girls with it. The recurrence of animals, marginalized people, spectators, and commodities reveals a single system of appraisal in which living beings become objects to inspect, consume, manipulate, or destroy.

Narrative Significance

Apartheid therefore functions as a test of the distance between Bateman’s declared principles and his conduct. He claims that society must end racial domination, provide shelter for the homeless, oppose racial discrimination, promote civil rights, and reduce materialism among young people. Yet the surrounding scenes show a speaker embedded in precisely the consumerist and socially stratified culture his speech nominally condemns, and a narrator whose attention to suffering repeatedly becomes contempt or violence.

The reference also demonstrates the novel’s unreliable political surface. Bateman’s list sounds comprehensive because it is so indiscriminate: foreign policy, domestic welfare, taxation, business expansion, moral values, television, music, and youth materialism are recited in one uninterrupted performance. The result is not a developed program but an image of ideological fluency detached from ethical perception. Apartheid remains present as a recognizable symbol of institutional racial injustice, but its deepest narrative force comes from the fact that Bateman can invoke that injustice while failing to recognize the humanity of the people directly before him.