Themes and message

Racial segregation and racism

The main theme of the short story “The Bench” by Richard Rive is racial segregation and racism. At the beginning, the speakers on the platform talk about the discriminatory society they live in, highlighting the inequalities between the whites and the blacks: 

We form an integral part of a complex society, a society in which a vast proportion of the population is denied the very basic right of existence, a society that condemns a man to an inferior position because he has the misfortune to be born black, a society that can only retain its precarious social and economic position at the expense of an enormous oppressed mass! (p. 213, ll. 1-8)

Karlie, the main character, lives in a society where black people suffer because of economic and social injustice. According to the speaker, the black population is “segregated ed...