Of the many things, amounting to nearly everything, I do not remember about Wuthering Heights is the issue of Heathcliff's ethnicity. Bronte herself is nonspecific regarding both his color and his parentage. As the story goes, the elder Earnshaw goes to Liverpool on business and returns with a dark little boy of whom he says only that he had rescued the boy from the streets and brought him home. It is suggested, though again not directly stated, that the boy may be an illegitimate son of Earnshaw, and indeed Earnshaw's wife berates him on this occasion for sleeping with a black woman.
Looking into the history of the period in England, it is clear that Liverpool was the center of Britain's transatlantic trade in enslaved people as well as the point of arrival of many brown-skinned people such as East Indians, gypsies, Chinese, and so on. Heathcliff himself is sometimes called a gypsy, and otherwise merely referred to vaguely as 'dark skinned'. He could be anything, really, from a Slav to a mixed race negro.
Bronte's point, in my mind anyway, is the impartation of a wildness, an uncivilized nature. Heathcliff is depicted as the quintessential "savage", whose foreignness establishes his position at civilization's periphery. He is the counterpoint to the stodgy, genteel society in which he has been placed and must function. Race itself is not the subject of Bronte's novel. Rather, it is the wildness of love which trespasses all 'civilized' boundaries, cultural, racial, religious, and is in this sense savage.
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