The Color Purple as a Political Critique of Race RelationsIf the integrated family of Doris Baines and her adopted African nephew exposes the missionary model of integration in Africa as based on a false kinship that Indeed, by denying the legitimacy of kinship ties across racial lines, the relationship between Miss Sophia and her white charge, Miss Eleanor Jane, serves a similar function for the American South. Sophia, of course, joins the mayor's family as a housekeeper under more overtly racist conditions. with respect to Doris Baines' adoption of her Akwee family: because she responds "hell no" (76) to Miss Millie's request to come and work for her as a maid, Sophia is brutally beaten by the mayor and six policemen and then imprisoned . Forced to do laundry in prison and driven to the brink of madness, Sophia finally becomes Miss Millie's maid to escape prison. Sophia's violent confrontation with the white officers obviously foregrounds issues of race and class, as critics who find these issues marginalized elsewhere in The Color Purple have also noted. But it is not only through Sophia's dramatic public battles with white men that her story dramatizes issues of race and class. His domestic relationship with Miss Eleanor Jane and other members of the mayor's family offers a broader and more nuanced critique of racial integration, even if it has often been overlooked. (11) Like Doris Baines and her black nephew, Sophia and Miss Eleanor Jane appear to have some genuine familial feelings for each other. Since Sophia "practically... raise[s]" (222) Miss Eleanor Jane and is the sympathetic person...... center of the paper......nold, 1993. 85-96.Sekora , John. “Is slave fiction a kind of autobiography?” Studies on autobiography. Ed. James Olney. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 99-111.Shelton, Frank W. “Alienation and Integration in Alice Walker's The ColorPurple.” CLA Journal 28 (1985): 382-92. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia.” Letters and Society 2 (1974): 201-21.Stade, George. "Feminist fiction and male characters". Partisan Review 52(1985): 264-70.Tate, Claudia. Domestic allegories of political desire: The black heroine text at the turn of the century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Drawings: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Walker, Alice. The color purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982.