Unearthing the Roots: White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig

Abstract

Unearthing the Roots:White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig Beth Boyens (bio) The cover of A. S. King’s 2020 Michael L. Printz award-winning novel Dig features this tagline: “White isn’t just a color.” With that assertion, readers are invited into a young adult novel that explores the toxicity of white privilege in the lives of its five teenage and two elderly protagonists. King’s novel is unabashedly about being white in contemporary U.S. society; as such, it enters an ongoing (and, some might say, too-late emerging) conversation about white privilege and systemic racism. It seems no accident that this novel came upon the scene in 2019 as the political climate bubbled with rancor and division. The novel is also an eerie precursor to the demonstrations, protests, and Twitter storm following the murder of George Floyd and leading up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—all while the young people of our nation looked on. Just two years earlier, Angie Thomas’s exploration of race, police brutality, and white privilege, The Hate U Give (2017), received a Printz Honor Award, behind Nina LeCour’s depiction of teenage depression in We Are Okay (2017). I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that these issues are related. The soul wound of our nation, the racism on which our country achieved its wealth and success, bleeds into the hearts and minds of this current generation—and they are feeling its effects. The link between racism/racial tension/political unrest and our young people’s mental health is apparent. Dig seeks to unearth the wounds at the root of the current milieu; in doing so, King identifies white privilege as its own sort of trauma. In his 1845 autobiography, former slave Frederick Douglass asserts that the institution of slavery was nearly as morally harmful to white owners as it was to black slaves. He describes his early interactions with a new mistress who had never before “had a slave under her control previously to myself” as amicable—even kind (1903). But since “power corrupts, [End Page 259] and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Douglass identifies the corruption particular to a racist system: Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tigerlike fierceness. (1905) The institution of slavery—and its parent, racism—wounds everyone, Douglass argues. The trauma is deep and long lasting. The reviews of Dig highlight its depiction of this trauma. The Kirkus Review describes the novel’s Hemmings family as having been “poisoned by virulent racism” (“Dig”), and Deborah Stevenson’s review in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books calls the novel “the most haunting exploration in youth literature to date of the advantage and poison that is white privilege, and the resentment of young people at the toxicity of what they inherit” (301). Indeed, the novel is about the roots and rootedness of racism and white privilege. Featuring three generations of the Hemmings family, the oldest of which lives in upper-class wealth acquired from a family potato farming business, Dig suggests (and not especially subtly) that the family’s racist roots tunnel deep into their history and collective psyche. Marla and Gottfried Hemmings, the family’s matriarch and patriarch, are at turns explicitly and implicitly racist. Marla, for example, reflects on what her father would “say about people who ate fried chicken” (187) and worries that she is “going to die because Gottfried had to have his soul food . . . I’m going to die in the farmers’ market surrounded by immigrants and Amish people. This is not where I want to die” (188). Gottfried’s racism is expressed in his inattention to the...