When Race is Not Race But Race Is Always Race--Shawshank Redemption

My students’ nomination of the Shawshank Redemption as a Film About Race

I wrote recently about teaching a race class and how much I learned from a set of students admitted to my law school without a need to use a lot of DEI methods, since the school was able to admit a nicely varied group of students without extra efforts. I got interesting diversity in the class by the luck of the draw during class registration. Perhaps someone needed a seminar. Or it was a convenient time slot. Perhaps a student had a class with me before and liked it. And my class got students interested in the topic. That sometimes happens.  I called the class Seminar in Race, Law and American Culture: From Slavery to Post Civil Rights.

              I explored legal materials, historical treatments of race, and some popular materials about race, including discussion of movies, albeit not a lot. I am not a movie buff. In one class, toward the end of the semester, I asked if there were good movie depictions of race that were worth watching. Almost in one voice, they began to shout, Shawshank Redemption.  They tried to explain what it was and why it was great. As I understood what they were saying, there was interracial cooperation among the prisoners to help a white prisoner make a break. It was a moving story of racial brotherhood. They exclaimed a shared enthusiasm in unison. Further, it was exciting and just too wonderful.

              A movie about a prison lacked appeal for me so I went for years without watching it. I think I investigated it and discovered that the basis for calling it a race movie was that one of the lead characters, who became friends with a white banker wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, was played by Morgan Freeman.  The movie is from a book by Stephen King. In the book, it turns out, the character eventually played by Freeman is Irish, with no race angle whatsoever (when everyone is white, race goes unnoticed). The casting of Morgan Freeman was not a race choice. The movie was not about race. Freeman’s selection was about his ability to create the character King has fashioned for a role as a foil and friend for the imprisoned banker.  I note in closing that AI asserts that the director wished to cast a Black actor, in addition to non-race reasons for casting Freeman. I am dubious whether that is a correct claim, and, if it is, not clear what to make of it.

Why, one wonders, did the class think it was a race story?  My title here suggests the answer:  When Race Is Not Race but Race Is Always Race.  What does that mean? First, it seems to mean race is race when someone is not white. Whiteness is increasingly studied as a race, but in truth, in the absence of a person “of color” in a setting with whites, whites have no race. For the most part, until “white power” movements have emerged, white people see themselves as the normative human form, which precludes sub-classification. It is notable that depictions of the Christian savior, who was undoubtedly “of color,” show him, in the Western world’s eye, in the guise of whiteness. As to whiteness being an unspoken default of Not Race—the human, without more--that conceit has been challenged from the rightward movement identifying whiteness as a race under demographic siege, with groups organizing around the premise that white racial identity is subject to danger from migration and low birthrates among the preferred white “race.”  It is also debunked by academics, with ground having been broken by Nell Irvin Painter’s book, The History of White People, published in 2011.

Before returning to the belief by the students that Shawshank was an inspiring race story, let us consider Prof Painter’s comment on the stubbornness of race as race, always. In a recent collection of her essays, she explains the difficulty in fiction of portraying what she refers to as “blackness.” She quotes Toni Morrison on the hard task of writing non-colorist literature about black people. Painter writes:  “Non-colorist literature does not make racial identity do the work of character creation. Characters may have racial identities--in the USA, race is too salient a part of experience to overlook. But race should not decide how a character acts or thinks or speaks or looks.” (page 43 of her 2024 book, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays).  Painter says of Morrison’s work, “Racial identification, invented to serve needs of subjugation, can diminish a character’s individual specificity, that hallmark of Morrison’s brilliance.” (page 44) These observations open an understanding of why a character written by Stephen King as an Irishman named Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding and played by Morgan Freeman can be highly specific in the sense of entirely undefined by race, since he was created without regard to race (whiteness being a default category not defined by race).  His persona is that of a man with a perspective from a long time in prison, with ideas for how to cope in the setting. He has common sense, knows how to get things done (smuggling goodies into the prison), and so on. That is the character from the book, with little/no change made for having a Black actor play him.

One result is likely that viewers provide race meanings that are not present in the character as Stephen King drew him in the book. His wisdom is undoubtedly understood by many as a stereotype of a Black person who knows adversity and is a font of hard-won awareness of accepting long prison time. He is a foil for the banker, wrongly imprisoned for murder, who believes that there must be a way to vindicate his innocence and leave prison. Over time, the banker has such skills he becomes prized by the warden for helping him make money illicitly. When a prisoner enters the prison who can supply evidence of the banker’s innocence, the warden entices him to come to an area where he can have him shot as an escapee, and so the warden does. The banker finally realizes his only path out of prison is an implausible plan for tunneling out through raw sewage, with business clothing and other gear for being outside the prison. Before leaving, he manages to take custody of bank deposit receipts for the warden’s graft. He visits the bank in a suit and tie and receives the funds in a cordial interaction with the bank officers. The contrast between the banker’s wiles and knowledge that helped him become a warden’s favorite and that of Morgan’s character is probably enhanced by the race lens through which viewers see a Black prisoner. Yet Red, a wise leader inside prison, has nothing to do with race. The banker is distinctly from a different class than everyone in the prison. He knows accounting and taxation. Red knows how to make things happen inside the prison, but merely in the way the Irish character was created by King. The portrayal of a prisoner with wiles is not anything about a Black stereotype of a street wise hustler. Undoubtedly, some who view the movie read race into a character that is not raced at all in conception, or in the skilled depiction by Morgan Freeman.  He has raceless “individual specificity” that comes from the pen of Stephen King about a white Irish prisoner.  A role can be just that—a raceless character outside a racial lens responding as a human being to a circumstance not written to be about race but inevitably read as race despite a creator’s intention.

Online discussion focuses on why there was no racism directed at Red, since the viewer reads race into his character.  One poster on a reddit movie stream asks: “Why didn’t Red face any racism in The Shawshank Redemption?” The poster answers himself: “I know he wasn’t originally intended to be a black character but he’s still a black man in the movie and the setting takes place in 1940s-60s America. Yet he’s one of the most popular guys in the prison and we never see him experience any racial harassment and that doesn’t seem very realistic.”

The assertion--“He is still a black man in the movie”--rejects any possibility the movie and the character are not racial in meaning. It is not possible to cast Morgan Freeman in a role written as a raceless figure—a specific individual--and keep out imputation of race meanings by viewers. It is simply there. The poster says, “He is still a black man…” One response tried to read into the character a meaning that race is not a problem.  “It's because society is varied like its people; nothing is like what people claim it to be. We're not helpless victims cowering between acts of racist oppression. We manage to live our lives and become successful in spite of the obstacles, that's why we're awesome, not victims.”  That is unlikely to be the point of casting Morgan Freeman as the actor well suited to the role, but I suppose you never know. I also suppose choosing a Black actor for some reason other than a perfect fit to draw the individual specificity of a character could have a purpose, but it seems unlikely to be for making a statement that race is no big deal in America.  Another one says, “While watching it, I just accepted that they weren’t working that angle. But you’re very right, the movie would be very different if they were going with realism.” Realism here is that being Black in prison is all about race and everything that happens about race in a prison is predictably bad.  This viewer makes no effort at spelling out what “realism” is, because there is the unstated belief everyone knows the American race script.

              Viewers simply cannot make sense of a script where an actor has non-white skin color but no race meaning in the authorial narrative. The director seemingly regarded Freeman as well suited by his acting skills and gifts to capture the King creation of Red. Morgan Freeman projects an air of authority that works well for the depiction of Red by King. As already noted, an AI result asserts that the director wanted the character to be African American but does not suggest why.  Perhaps the director wanted to play with the heads of people who cannot fail to see race. I don’t know, but I am convinced it could not be to say race is of no significance for one’s life chances, or to depart from the features of Red drawn by King.

Once again Toni Morrison nails our world. “Characters may have racial identities--in the USA, race is too salient a part of experience to overlook. But race should not decide how a character acts or thinks or speaks or looks.”  Here, there is no indication that the creators of the movie used race to decide how Red acts or thinks or speaks or looks. He is Stephen King’s white Irishman. Morgan Freeman, the person, displays authority in his voice. He just does. That quality was good for the un-raced character created by Stephen King.

The creators of Red for the movie do not necessarily think about race with the same intellectual grasp as Toni Morrison. Red, a creation of movies, is not” raced.” That basic fact doesn’t matter. We are told by a viewer, “He is still a black man.” Another viewer tells us there is something called realism that was not there because he got treated like a white man. And that is not how things work, he says. Another person argues that it proves race is not a problem here, thereby urging an ideological claim to see the character through a racial lens and simultaneously deny the relevance of race.

You see what Toni Morrison was saying.