Not until the Civil Rights Movement (1955-68) prohibited discrimination of all kinds, the situation for African descent people improved. Although slavery was abolished after the American Civil War the majority of the white population in the USA held fixed prejudices against black people and some even transformed their hatred into violence (lynchings and assassinations). During that period, Afro-Americans were strictly segregated from white people in all public facilities, for example restaurants, parks and schools. Published in 1928, it is set in the 1920's and 1930's at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. In this term paper, I will analyse the topic of interracial and intraracial racism in Nella Larsen's first novel Quicksand. Consequently, when discussing the topic racism in Quicksand, one must keep in mind the importance of the mutual influence and the coaction between race and gender. Helga is forced to fight "against imposed definitions of blackness and womanhood" 2 which are inflicted on her by an oppressive white and black society. The heroine, Helga Crane, moves to several places throughout the novel and in all of these locations she has to face stereotypes which restrain and oppress her. Both, interracial ("hostile white folk") and intraracial ("snobbish black folk") constructions of racism are considered within the text. This quotation demonstrates the complexity of racial issues Nella Larsen deals with in Quicksand. The feeling of smallness which had hedged her in, first during her sorry unchildlike childhood among hostile white folk in Chicago, and later during her uncomfortable sojourn among snobbish black folk in Naxos." 1
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