We could understand the position of the handmaids and the Rachels as analogous to that of female slaves in the United States prior to the Civil War. Like Offred, enslaved women were often renamed according to the whims of the whites. For example, attractive black women were often called "Venus" to help make them more likely to sell. The slaves also were forbidden to read, as the women are in Gilead. Like Offred, they would live in an oddly isolated world, cut off from news of the wider world and dependent on whatever secret networks they could establish with other people of their class to get information.
Slaves were told what to wear, and like Offred and the other handmaids, they were subject to severe physical punishment and mutilation for disobeying their captors. After importing slaves was made illegal, white men also deliberately raped black enslaved women to create more slaves, as any child born of a slave was automatically a slave.
Like Gilead, the antebellum south was a rigidly hierarchical society, with the wealthy white males on top and everyone else in a particular place in the social order.
The Handmaid's Tale is set in a future dystopian republic, Gilead, which is clearly the United States. This is indicated in part by the information provided that people try to escape by crossing the border into Canada, as well as mentioning specific states such as North Dakota.
The novel is about race in several ways. The overall conceit is that the handmaids are used as breeders for white babies, as the Gilead leaders worry that the white birthrate has declined. The novel contains some information that seems to be specifically about African Americans. In particular, Atwood tells us that the "children of Ham" are resettled as laborers in farm camps. This phrase alludes to the Biblical description for Africans as descending through the lineage of Noah's son Ham.
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