Is Disgrace a Racist novel???

“Disgrace” was a novel about a David Laurie a college professor who goes to live with his daughter Lucy on the farm after he is accused of sexual harassment by one of his students. While he is there he helps out on the farm and at an animal shelter. Everything is going find until one day two men and a boy show up and change their lives. David is set on fire and his daughter is raped. Lucy becomes pregnant and decides to keep the baby. In “Out of South Africa, Coetzee’s Novel “Disgrace’ is said to be racist. It is stated that Coetzee is representing the white man’s perception of the post – apartheid black man as negative. The essay also states that in the novel the white man is losing their weapons, property, rights, dinigty, and that white women will have to sleep with “barbaric” black men.

Chris Van Wyk says “The white characters are fleshed out, the black evildoers are not”. This one sentence is a powerful one, in the novel Coetzee is giving the black man a negative image. I guess the reason someone might be led to believe this , is because in the novel Lucy still works on the farm with the black family they believe is hiding the rapists; this is giving black men a negative image. I mean ok the rapist was black, but should the family hide them; just because they are the same race. I found that aspect a little racist. Nadine Gordimer resented this idea and I agree with her. I just don’t see any reason for the family to have help out these criminals / rapist. Also the fact that David sleeps with Bev Shaw and her husband doesn’t resent him for it . I felt that this was a important in the story , because his sexual deviance I was the reason he was there in the first place. I got the feeling that David would never really learn his lesson no matter how many times he would get in a little trouble. Aside from that I didn’t really real think that the book was all that racist. I would say neither Coetzee or this novel was racist , I just think that he wrote about what was happening in South Africa during post - apartheid.