What This Theme Explores
Race, Slavery, and Systemic Racism in Geraldine Brooks’s Horse asks how a nation built on bondage continues to reproduce its hierarchies in subtler, yet still deadly, forms. The novel probes what it means to be named, owned, and seen—how institutions and images deem some people valuable and others expendable. By drawing a straight line from the dehumanization of Jarret Lewis to the killing of Theo, Brooks argues that history is not backdrop but engine, shaping who is believed, who is remembered, and whose life is protected. The book insists that the afterlives of slavery endure in policy, habit, and sightlines—what people expect to see when they look at a Black body.
How It Develops
Across the 1850s–1870s, racism is not subtext but structure: the legal fact of chattel slavery organizes every facet of Jarret’s world. His very name is a tag of possession, his talents monetized by others, and his safety contingent on white whims. Even the example of Harry Lewis—a free Black man whose expertise powers Lexington’s rise—exposes the trap: skill and respect cannot secure true Freedom and Agency in a system designed to choke off Black ownership, mobility, and kinship.
In the 1950s, the novel shifts from chains to silence. When Martha Jackson acquires a celebrated painting of Lexington, the record that travels with the artwork effaces the Black horsemen who made the horse’s greatness possible. Domestic “politeness” with her maid, Annie Hawthorne, keeps a hierarchy in place without needing to say its name, and the art world’s provenance files become tools of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives, laundering white glory and omitting Black labor.
By 2019, racism moves through institutions and split-second perceptions. Theo, despite elite credentials, calibrates his movement through public space to manage white fear; his scholarship seeks to restore the very people the art market and archives erased. Jess begins with unexamined bias, then is forced into clarity when Theo is shot by police—a contemporary replay of the old script that presumes Black guilt first and asks questions later. The three timelines converge to show that what changes is the costume; what persists is the value system.
Key Examples
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Dehumanization through naming: Jarret is introduced and addressed as an appendage to his owners—“Warfield’s Jarret,” then “Ten Broeck’s Jarret.” The grammar of possession teaches everyone how to see him: as property whose identity shifts with white ownership. The novel makes this everyday linguistic habit into an index of stolen personhood.
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The bylaws that cancel Black ownership: Though Harry is the architect of Lexington’s success, white gatekeepers deny his stake by brandishing racing-club rules crafted to exclude him.
“No negro or mulatto, to make nomination in any stake, to be run over this course.” The line shows racism operating not as personal prejudice alone but as policy—rules that look procedural while enforcing white control of wealth and prestige.
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Modern microaggressions as surveillance: Theo’s neighbor rebuffs a gesture of kindness, signaling he is unwelcome in his own building. Even his safest activity—running—demands preemptive self-defense through signaling elite affiliation:
Daniel, his best friend at Yale, had instructed him that a Black man, running, should dress defensively. Everyday precautions reveal the mental tax of living inside others’ fearful projections.
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Unconscious bias made visible: When Jess sees Theo near her bike, her mind leaps to theft before she can stop herself:
She choked back the accusing words. She didn’t want to be that woman. The moment punctures her self-image, demonstrating how stereotypes live beneath progressive self-concepts and surface under stress.
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Lethal culmination in the present: A police officer sees Theo aiding a white woman and assumes a crime, then retrofits the official account to cast Theo as “assailant.” The scene collapses centuries—the presumption of Black criminality that once justified bondage now rationalizes state violence.
Character Connections
Jarret’s life embodies the paradox of brilliance under bondage. His bond with Lexington is a real, hard-won achievement—he reads the horse with near-telepathic acuity—yet he cannot legally own the animal or the fruits of his labor. His careful code-switching and tactical obedience are survival strategies that expose the moral perversion of a world where excellence deepens exploitation rather than loosening it.
Theo is Jarret’s modern echo and answer. He is shaped by institutions that both include and endanger him: the university invites his research into erased Black horsemen even as public space marks his body as suspect. His death is not an aberration but the novel’s indictment—a proof that education and decorum cannot shield a Black man from the lethal presumptions the past still breathes into the present.
Jess stands for the teachable witness. Her first reflex—misreading Theo by stereotype—reveals how bias is ambient and learned. Her grief-driven resolve to steward his memory and his dog, Clancy, models an imperfect but necessary practice: moving from private shame to sustained responsibility.
Harry Lewis dramatizes the fragility of Black freedom in the 19th century. He purchases his liberty and earns professional respect, yet he cannot secure his son’s status or his rightful stake in Lexington. His limits, set by white institutions rather than personal failings, sharpen the theme’s focus on systems over intentions.
On the white side of power, Dr. Warfield’s paternalism, Richard Ten Broeck’s opportunism, and Thomas J. Scott’s genteel Northern complicity map a spectrum of participation. Whether by “kind” ownership, legal cunning, or profit-taking at one remove, each man benefits from and thereby sustains the racist order. The spectrum widens our view of culpability beyond cartoon villains to the everyday mechanics of advantage.
Symbolic Elements
Lexington (the horse): A masterpiece made by many hands, Lexington becomes a ledger of extraction. His speed and fame depend on Jarret’s and Harry’s expertise, yet the records and riches flow upward to white owners. The horse’s body carries both the glory and the theft.
The Troye painting: Richard Singleton with Viley’s Harry, Charles and Lew is a museum-ready artifact of erasure—the title centers ownership while reducing the men to extensions of a white patron. Theo’s conflicting response—admiring the art while bristling at its framing—mirrors the novel’s project: to look long enough to see the invisible labor inside the gilded frame.
The police shooting: Theo’s death operates as a contemporary symbol that condenses the theme into a single, devastating image—authority, fear, and narrative control converging to end a Black life. It yokes past and present so tightly that the reader cannot separate “then” from “now.”
Contemporary Relevance
Horse speaks into a world reckoning with police violence and the unequal burdens of everyday life for Black Americans. Theo’s need to “dress defensively,” to soothe white anxiety simply to jog, makes visible how civic spaces are not equally shared. By suturing Jarret’s 19th-century bondage to Theo’s 21st-century vulnerability, the novel argues that justice requires more than memory—it requires dismantling the policies, habits, and stories that keep reproducing the same outcomes. Its urgency is not metaphorical; it is a call to revalue Black life in law, culture, and imagination.
Essential Quote
“Then why the deuce, Jarret Lewis, don’t you give your right name?”
“It ain’t allowed, Mar—I mean, suh. Only free men can go by they name.”
This exchange crystallizes the theme: a name—life’s most basic marker of self—becomes a privilege reserved for the free. Jarret’s correction mid-sentence shows how domination polices even speech, training the enslaved to anticipate offense and punishment. The moment turns grammar into politics, revealing how language itself enforces the border between property and person.