Racial hierarchy

Racial hierarchy is the system of assumptions and practices that assigns authority, freedom, and human worth along racial lines in Washington Black. It governs Washington’s life beyond the plantation: escape changes his location, but not the social conditions that mark him as property, restrict his opportunities, expose him to violence, and deny him recognition for his knowledge and work.

Ownership and the Language of Status

The hierarchy is explicit aboard the ship when Captain Benedikt challenges Titch’s description of Washington as a friend by insisting that Washington is property. Titch confirms that he owns him, then argues that Washington’s scientific illustration and skill in expressing aeronautical methods make him useful as a personal assistant. His defense asks that the crew respect Washington’s abilities, but it does not reject the ownership claim on which the exchange rests. Benedikt’s reply reduces Washington to a racialized category and dismisses the evidence of his expertise.

That moment condenses a larger contradiction in Titch’s conduct. Washington later accuses him of having chosen a Black boy partly because he could serve an abolitionist political cause and assist in experiments, while failing to recognize the damage slavery inflicted on Black people or to regard Washington as an equal. The accusation is painful precisely because Washington recognizes both its distortions and its truth: an opponent of slavery can still act within racial hierarchies and center the moral injury to white men over the lived injury to the enslaved.

Freedom Under Threat

After reaching Nova Scotia, Washington hopes to find security among the Loyalists, but Shelburne offers little land or provision, and Black people receive the worst opportunities when they receive any. He finds work in a small fishery, yet freedom does not remove the danger of being forced back into slavery. Kidnappers patrol the coast, stunning freed men and dragging them onto ships bound for the Southern states. Washington’s fugitive status has made his liberty precarious rather than secure.

Economic resentment supplies another route for racial violence. White men blame Black workers for lowering wages and sometimes attack them as a supposed threat to their livelihoods. One night outside a tavern, an assailant grabs Washington by the throat from behind. Washington fights back by pressing pebbles into the man’s eyes and escapes, but he cannot stop imagining that the attacker was John Willard. The incident leaves him more watchful and solitary; racial hierarchy reaches him not only through law and ownership, but through the ordinary public spaces in which a Black man may be seized or assaulted.

Public Space, Bodies, and Respectability

In London, racial exclusion appears as a demand to assign Washington to a place. A finely dressed woman sees him on the viewing deck and tells Goff that his Black attendant belongs below with the animals. Goff is outraged and, after this encounter, increasingly confronts people who insult Washington. The episode makes the hierarchy visible in a setting organized around the display of living specimens: the woman treats Washington himself as an exhibit to be segregated, collapsing the distinction between a person and the animals he helps care for.

The contrast between Washington’s competence and the public reading of his body recurs. During the sea crossing, he and Goff work to keep the specimens alive, gathering clean seawater in fir-wood casks when the octopus grows lethargic, and testing it with an instrument Washington devised. Yet onlookers still see an old man and an ugly, burnt slave drinking from the sea. Washington’s burns and the label of enslavement shape how others interpret him, obscuring the practical knowledge and care his work demonstrates.

The crowd outside Newgate also makes racial hierarchy part of public spectacle. Among the hundreds gathered for executions are sailors, former slaves, women, and children who move through the muddy streets. Washington pushes a path through the crowd with Tanna as he approaches the gallows where Louis Hazzard, a Black man, and John Francis Willard are due to be hanged for different crimes. The scene places racialized identity within a public order of punishment and spectacle, while Washington’s own history with Willard makes the execution an intensely personal reckoning.

Recognition, Labor, and Unequal Agency

Racial hierarchy also determines who can claim knowledge and receive credit. Washington’s idea for a permanent exhibition of aquatic life becomes Ocean House, and the Zoological Committee accepts the proposal. But Washington understands that the public is likely to celebrate Goff, not a young, disfigured Black man without formal scientific training, as its creator. The obstacle is not simply that Washington lacks credentials: the same racial order that undervalues his body makes it difficult for him to approach the committee or be seen as Goff’s equal in the enterprise.

Goff’s treatment of Washington is more attentive than that of the woman on the viewing deck, and their work together becomes a bond of mutual respect. Yet personal regard does not erase the structural inequality governing authorship and public standing. Washington can make discoveries, devise tools, and shape the project while anticipating that the historical credit will belong to someone else. The novel therefore presents racial hierarchy not as a single villain’s prejudice but as a pattern reproduced through ownership, labor, safety, public space, and the distribution of recognition.