Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult tells the story of Ruth Jefferson, an African American labor and delivery nurse who is faced with her biggest moral dilemma after a newborn codes on her watch and dies. The problem, though, was the parents, Turk and Brit, refused for her to care and even touch their baby because Ruth is Black. The novel follows Ruth as her knowledge and integrity are questioned harshly while she tries to navigate if she was in the right or the wrong for letting a child die.
Picoult’s main point with this novel is to emphasize the power structures present within these situations. Turk and Brit, the parents of the child, were extreme white supremacists. They believed any black person was dirty, inadequate, and/or less than them. In their heads, it gave reasoning as to why they were allowed to refuse Ruth to care for their child, but in reality, it was creating a hierarchy of power that, in turn, othered Ruth. They refused to acknowledge her as the well-trained nurse with 20+ years of experience and instead diminished her to her race. It perpetuates the ideas of power that white people have over people of color, not only because the hospital Ruth worked for allowed for her to be discriminated against, but also because Turk and Brit believed they had the right in the first place to keep someone from doing their job because they weren’t white.
This work calls into question the discrimination that people face due to the extreme prejudices and biases of those with power in our society. Their narrow beliefs create systems of power that create a cycle to help those who are at the top while putting blame on those at the bottom. The work focuses on how one has to navigate personal and societal standards to figure out how to act. It highlights how only more confusion is added as one has to change their identity to be seen as “societally acceptable,” and, even then, outward appearances, like race and gender, still cause biases and prejudices against them.
As Picoult is a white woman trying to write about the discrimination a Black woman faces, the book, in my eyes, is a form of subaltern-ing since she is trying to give a voice to a character that she gets to control and tell the story for. Though, her form of subaltern-ing is used to start a conversation on what structures of power are on their side or against them. Picoult, a white female who will never have to face the discrimination and hardships a person of color will face, knows she has the world on her side and uses her power as an author and white American to write about the real challenges a person of color will have to face in their life.