Shakespeare lived and wrote during the time in which Britain was making its first earnest attempts at building an overseas empire. Voyages and colonization are themes he writes about multiple times, in The Tempest, Pericles, and others. Othello appears to anticipate racist justifications for colonialism which would develop more clearly later in in the British Empire. Shakespeare may have seen the beginnings of these theories and attitudes which would eventually form racism as we understand it today, with a hierarchy of ethnicity and a responsibility of Europeans to civilize and Christianize. Othello, in the most straightforward way, is a play about race. The attitudes that some characters hold toward Othello are familiar racist attitudes toward us. The clearest and most prevalent example is the comparison of Othello to an animal. It appears in the very first scene when Iago says the following to Brabanzio:

Sir, you’re robbed. For shame put on your gown.

Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul:

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe. Arise! Arise!

Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.

Arise, I say!

In one of the first descriptions of Othello, he is likened to an animal. Modern audiences should be familiar with comparisons between black folks and animals with the insinuation that their intelligence is lower, and their instinctual impulses are stronger than those of white folks. Later in this scene, Iago and Roderigo speak of Othello’s powerful sexual appetite and his savageness. This Iago quote even includes a more contemporary American anxiety; that delicate and impressionable white women will be lured in by charismatic black men who will corrupt them. The illegitimacy of a union between people of a different race is not a foreign concept to us. When Iago calls Othello a devil, we are reminded that he is an unchristian, even anti-Christian force, being a Moor. That is part of the threat he poses, even though Othello is a collaborator on the side of Iago in a conflict with the major Islamic empire of the time.

We discussed in class the idea of Iago as a villain without any reason for being evil. The more I consider his character, the more I am convinced that he is motivated by unambiguous racism. Iago seems prepared to undermine Othello’s relationship with Desdemona from the introduction of his character. We never observe Iago in a monologue on his motivations or his reasons for dismantling Othello’s life. We can only assume that, by the way he speaks about Othello and the parts of his life he targets, he hates seeing a dark skinned person in a position of power, wed to a white woman. He sees an illegitimacy there which he feels he must point out to the other characters. When the other characters do not heed his warnings and give Othello their favor, Iago appears to fall into line behind him, to target him more covertly. Iago is not a villain without a motivation, racism is a perfectly legitimate motivation for a character so evil.