Othello’s tragedy shows Muslim ancestry is inescapable even when the character himself repudiates it

Evidence

The identity of Shakespeare’s Othello is a bit more complicated. While he denies his Muslim identity, and speaks strongly against Muslims in the play, his Moorish ancestry is what eventually does Othello in. Othello makes clear his hatred for the Turks, including the final scene before his death, when he calls the Muslim a “circumcised dog.” Yet, his descent into madness is predicated on his racial and religious foundations. He is unable to escape either his blackness or his Muslim bloodlines. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 308

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The internally-divided Muslim monster — self-hating but condemned by blood — connects to the reader’s question of what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing about themselves, since the demonization is inscribed in ancestry, beyond any character’s choice.

Related

• Othello’s tragic fall is fixed by bloodline rather than his own actions (similarity 0.92)
• Racial identity alone marked Othello as a monster regardless of his actions (similarity 0.86)
• Othello’s Moorish identity made his monstrous fate inescapable regardless of his actions. (similarity 0.85)
• Tamburlaine and Othello threatened English racial purity as monstrous hybrids of multiple races. (similarity 0.79)
• Elizabethan audiences read Othello’s blackness itself as proof of monstrosity (similarity 0.78)