The history of racism and exclusion in the United States is the history of whiteness.
A generation ago, as the culture wars raged, Toni Morrison often stood at the front lines, demanding the desegregation of the American literary canon. In her Tanner Lectures in 1988, and later in her book Playing in the Dark, she argued against a monochromatic literary canon that had seemed forever to be naturally and inevitably all-white but was, in fact, “studiously” so. She accused scholars of “lobotomizing” literary history and criticism in order to free them of black presence. Broadening our conception of American literature beyond the cast of lily-white men would not simply benefit nonwhite readers. Opening up would serve the interests of American mental as well as intellectual health, since the white racial ideology that purged literature of blackness was, Morrison said, “savage.” She called the very concept of whiteness “an inhuman idea.”
In her new book, The Origin of Others, Morrison extends and sharpens these themes as she traces through American literature patterns of thought and behavior that subtly code who belongs and who doesn’t, who is accepted in and who is cast out as “Other.” She has previously written of how modernist novelists like William Faulkner (who saw race) and Ernest Hemingway (who did not) respected the codes of Jim Crow by dehumanizing black figures or ignoring the connotations of blackness in their nonblack figures. But the process of exiling some people from humanity, she observes here, also ranges beyond American habits of race: One need only look at the treatment of millions now in flight from war and economic desperation. Othering as a means of control is not just the practice of white people in the United States, for every group perfects its self-regard through exclusion.
Morrison anchors her discussion of these complexities in her personal experience, recounting a memory from her childhood in the 1930s: a visit from her great-grandmother, Millicent MacTeer, a figure of enormous power whose skin was very black. On her arrival, MacTeer looked at Toni and her sister, two girls with light skin, and pronounced them “tampered with.” Colorism ordinarily refers to black people’s denigration of dark skin and preference for people who are light, but in this case it meant, more broadly, a judgment based on skin color. “It became clear,” Morrison writes, “that ‘tampered with’ meant lesser, if not completely Other.” Deemed “sullied, not pure” as a child, Morrison finds that Othering, as well as the racial self-loathing of colorism, begin in the family and connect to race, class, gender, and power.
Morrison’s history of Othering represents an intervention in history on several fronts. Although the theme of desegregating the literary canon reappears in The Origin of Others, times have changed since Playing in the Dark. Surely thanks to the more multicultural, multiracial canon that Morrison helped foster, no respectable version of American literature today omits writers of color. Morrison herself has received nearly all the honors a novelist can win: the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor, among many more. The Origin of Others is the result of her lectures in the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, where she is only the fourth woman and the second black lecturer in the 92-year history of the series.
Within the Norton Lectures’ tradition of wisdom, and among its tellers, Morrison represents a novelty by virtue of her gender, her race, and her American subject matter. Historically the series has shown a preference for European topics and for British scholars as avatars of learning. Not until 2014, when Herbie Hancock addressed “The Ethics of Jazz,” did the Norton recognize wisdom in the humanities as both pertaining to American culture and emanating from a black body. Morrison’s lectures and book are a historic achievement, as they confirm the impact of her intellectual tradition in American thought—a tradition that links her to James Baldwin, and in a younger generation Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the critique of whiteness.
Morrison’s earliest witnesses of Othering are two women who had been enslaved, Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom later recorded their physical and mental torture at the hands of their owners. In her 1831 memoir, Prince described her owner’s reinforcement of hierarchy through beating; her master “would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped…walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure.” Thirty years later, Jacobs wrote of how slavery made “the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious.” Within slavery, the process of Othering is physical, and is meant to work in only one direction, from the slaver to the slave.
Morrison asks instead, “Who are these people?”—focusing not on the victimized enslaved, but on the victimizing owners. “The definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher...the pleasure of the one with the lash.” Rendering the slave “a foreign species,” Morrison concludes, “appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal.” Humanity links the enslaved and the enslaver, no matter how viciously owners seek to deny the connection. Torture, the crucial ingredient of slave ownership, dehumanizes not the slave but the owner. “It’s as though they are shouting, ‘I am not a beast! I’m not a beast!’ ” Neither side escapes unscathed.
Even when physical force is used, the people doing the Othering can also bolster their self-definition through words. Thomas Thistlewood, an English planter and rapist who moved to Jamaica in 1750, documented his assaults on the women he owned, categorizing those that took place on the ground, in the fields, and in large and small rooms, whenever, wherever he wished. He noted the rapes in his journal in Latin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes a very different tone, defining the Other by making a romance of slave life. Stowe presents a slave’s cabin through dulcet description that Morrison calls “outrageously inviting,” “cultivated,” “seductive,” and “excessive.” Here, a white child can enter black space without fear of the dark, the very sweetness of the language reinforcing the Otherness of places where black people live.
Othering is expressed through codes of belonging as well as difference. Most commonly, pronouns convey the boundaries between “we” and “them” through the use of first- and third-person plurals. “We” belong; “they” are Other and cannot belong. Those who are “them” can be described in the negative language of disgust: black as ugly, black as polluting. Definitions of color, Morrison says, define what it means to be an American, for belonging adheres to whiteness. The possession of whiteness makes belonging possible, and to lack that possession is not to belong, to be defined as something lesser, even something not fully human. Neither possession nor lack is natural or biological. Something has to happen; a process needs to get underway.
Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Artificial ******,” set in 1950s Georgia, well after the end of the slavery that kept people in place, exemplifies how Othering and belonging work in tandem. A white man, Mr. Head, and his grandson Nelson visit Atlanta for the day. Mr. Head, a poor and sad old man, undertakes to tutor Nelson in racial hierarchy. On the train to the city, a prosperous black man passes by. At first, Nelson sees “a man.” Then, under Mr. Head’s questioning, “a fat man…an old man.” These are wrong answers. Nelson must be educated. Mr. Head corrects him: “That was a ******.” Nelson must undergo the process of unseeing a well-dressed man and reseeing a “******,” to understand the man as Other and himself and his uncle as people who belong to society.
Blackness remains the great challenge to writers of fiction on all sides of the color line, for the central role of race in American Othering affects us all, white and nonwhite, black and nonblack, not just writers who are white. Morrison describes her own struggles with color codes in her work, notably in her novelsParadise (1997) and Home (2012), and her story and play Recitatif (1983). “Writing non-colorist literature about black people,” she writes, “is a task I have found both liberating and hard.” Non-colorist literature does not make racial identity do the work of character creation. Characters may have racial identities—in the USA, race is too salient a part of experience to overlook. But race should not decide how a character acts or thinks or speaks or looks.
Morrison articulates her determination “to de-fang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself.” But it is far from easy. The actors in Recitatif, like editors and many readers, want to identify characters by race—a crucial ingredient of American identity, but one defined by generalizations rooted in the history of slavery and too facilely evoked through recognizable stereotypes. Racial identification, invented to serve needs of subjugation, can diminish a character’s individual specificity, that hallmark of Morrison’s brilliance.
Where Morrison identifies race, she struggles against the expectations of race.Paradise begins with color—“They shoot the white girl first.” But she never says which of the women in the group under attack is white, and offers almost no clues. (“Some readers have told me of their guess,” Morrison reveals in The Origin of Others, “but only one of them was ever correct.”) Paradise turns to themes of black colorism’s purity requirements and misogyny, the deadly means of Othering that Morrison’s characters employ. Colorism appears early on in the novel with wealth; in 1890, members of an established black community turn away a group of freedmen deemed too poor and too dark. The freedmen go on to found the town of Haven and its successor, Ruby, and from that moment up to the novel’s present in the 1970s, they pride themselves on their unadulterated blackness. Nearby, a group of women, seeking refuge from unhappy pasts, move into an old convent. One source of the Ruby men’s murderous hatred of the women is their racial heterogeneity—their utter lack of racial purity. But that is not the only source: In Paradise, misogyny fuels the hatred that kills.
Looking back on Home, Morrison admits to misgivings. It was a mistake, she concludes, to accede to her editor’s request for color-coding the main character, Frank Money. A minor mistake, for Money’s race only appears obliquely, after a two-page description of the hospital he is leaving. A reader would have to know that in the tiny AME Zion church that succors Money, AME means African Methodist Episcopal. A few pages later, the reader would need to grasp the meaning of he “won’t be able to sit down at any bus stop counter.” If Morrison lost the struggle between individual characterization and racial identification, which not only flattens out characters but also furthers racist habits of thought, it was just barely. Throughout her career, Morrison has confronted those habits and broken them down, not just in her own writing but also in her work as an editor.
In her 19 years at Random House, Morrison made known the stories of a variety of specific lives and their individual identities. She published biographies of the writer Toni Cade Bambara, the activist-scholar Angela Davis, and the athlete Muhammad Ali. In 1974, she published a nonfiction anthology: The Black Book, a scrapbook of black history drawn from the collection of Middleton A. Harris, who also served as its editor. There readers discovered photographs of black soldiers in impeccable uniforms, black families in their Sunday best, patents for typewriters and laundry machines, and early black movie stars, along with postcards of smiling white people at a lynching. The abundance and variety of material relating to the history of people of African descent in The Black Book opened millions of eyes to diversity within blackness, a crucial step in loosening the grip of American apartheid.
Long read, continue to full story: Toni Morrison's Radical Vision of Otherness
A generation ago, as the culture wars raged, Toni Morrison often stood at the front lines, demanding the desegregation of the American literary canon. In her Tanner Lectures in 1988, and later in her book Playing in the Dark, she argued against a monochromatic literary canon that had seemed forever to be naturally and inevitably all-white but was, in fact, “studiously” so. She accused scholars of “lobotomizing” literary history and criticism in order to free them of black presence. Broadening our conception of American literature beyond the cast of lily-white men would not simply benefit nonwhite readers. Opening up would serve the interests of American mental as well as intellectual health, since the white racial ideology that purged literature of blackness was, Morrison said, “savage.” She called the very concept of whiteness “an inhuman idea.”
In her new book, The Origin of Others, Morrison extends and sharpens these themes as she traces through American literature patterns of thought and behavior that subtly code who belongs and who doesn’t, who is accepted in and who is cast out as “Other.” She has previously written of how modernist novelists like William Faulkner (who saw race) and Ernest Hemingway (who did not) respected the codes of Jim Crow by dehumanizing black figures or ignoring the connotations of blackness in their nonblack figures. But the process of exiling some people from humanity, she observes here, also ranges beyond American habits of race: One need only look at the treatment of millions now in flight from war and economic desperation. Othering as a means of control is not just the practice of white people in the United States, for every group perfects its self-regard through exclusion.
Morrison anchors her discussion of these complexities in her personal experience, recounting a memory from her childhood in the 1930s: a visit from her great-grandmother, Millicent MacTeer, a figure of enormous power whose skin was very black. On her arrival, MacTeer looked at Toni and her sister, two girls with light skin, and pronounced them “tampered with.” Colorism ordinarily refers to black people’s denigration of dark skin and preference for people who are light, but in this case it meant, more broadly, a judgment based on skin color. “It became clear,” Morrison writes, “that ‘tampered with’ meant lesser, if not completely Other.” Deemed “sullied, not pure” as a child, Morrison finds that Othering, as well as the racial self-loathing of colorism, begin in the family and connect to race, class, gender, and power.
Morrison’s history of Othering represents an intervention in history on several fronts. Although the theme of desegregating the literary canon reappears in The Origin of Others, times have changed since Playing in the Dark. Surely thanks to the more multicultural, multiracial canon that Morrison helped foster, no respectable version of American literature today omits writers of color. Morrison herself has received nearly all the honors a novelist can win: the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor, among many more. The Origin of Others is the result of her lectures in the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, where she is only the fourth woman and the second black lecturer in the 92-year history of the series.
Within the Norton Lectures’ tradition of wisdom, and among its tellers, Morrison represents a novelty by virtue of her gender, her race, and her American subject matter. Historically the series has shown a preference for European topics and for British scholars as avatars of learning. Not until 2014, when Herbie Hancock addressed “The Ethics of Jazz,” did the Norton recognize wisdom in the humanities as both pertaining to American culture and emanating from a black body. Morrison’s lectures and book are a historic achievement, as they confirm the impact of her intellectual tradition in American thought—a tradition that links her to James Baldwin, and in a younger generation Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the critique of whiteness.
Morrison’s earliest witnesses of Othering are two women who had been enslaved, Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom later recorded their physical and mental torture at the hands of their owners. In her 1831 memoir, Prince described her owner’s reinforcement of hierarchy through beating; her master “would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped…walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure.” Thirty years later, Jacobs wrote of how slavery made “the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious.” Within slavery, the process of Othering is physical, and is meant to work in only one direction, from the slaver to the slave.
Morrison asks instead, “Who are these people?”—focusing not on the victimized enslaved, but on the victimizing owners. “The definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher...the pleasure of the one with the lash.” Rendering the slave “a foreign species,” Morrison concludes, “appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal.” Humanity links the enslaved and the enslaver, no matter how viciously owners seek to deny the connection. Torture, the crucial ingredient of slave ownership, dehumanizes not the slave but the owner. “It’s as though they are shouting, ‘I am not a beast! I’m not a beast!’ ” Neither side escapes unscathed.
Even when physical force is used, the people doing the Othering can also bolster their self-definition through words. Thomas Thistlewood, an English planter and rapist who moved to Jamaica in 1750, documented his assaults on the women he owned, categorizing those that took place on the ground, in the fields, and in large and small rooms, whenever, wherever he wished. He noted the rapes in his journal in Latin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin takes a very different tone, defining the Other by making a romance of slave life. Stowe presents a slave’s cabin through dulcet description that Morrison calls “outrageously inviting,” “cultivated,” “seductive,” and “excessive.” Here, a white child can enter black space without fear of the dark, the very sweetness of the language reinforcing the Otherness of places where black people live.
Othering is expressed through codes of belonging as well as difference. Most commonly, pronouns convey the boundaries between “we” and “them” through the use of first- and third-person plurals. “We” belong; “they” are Other and cannot belong. Those who are “them” can be described in the negative language of disgust: black as ugly, black as polluting. Definitions of color, Morrison says, define what it means to be an American, for belonging adheres to whiteness. The possession of whiteness makes belonging possible, and to lack that possession is not to belong, to be defined as something lesser, even something not fully human. Neither possession nor lack is natural or biological. Something has to happen; a process needs to get underway.
Flannery O’Connor’s story “The Artificial ******,” set in 1950s Georgia, well after the end of the slavery that kept people in place, exemplifies how Othering and belonging work in tandem. A white man, Mr. Head, and his grandson Nelson visit Atlanta for the day. Mr. Head, a poor and sad old man, undertakes to tutor Nelson in racial hierarchy. On the train to the city, a prosperous black man passes by. At first, Nelson sees “a man.” Then, under Mr. Head’s questioning, “a fat man…an old man.” These are wrong answers. Nelson must be educated. Mr. Head corrects him: “That was a ******.” Nelson must undergo the process of unseeing a well-dressed man and reseeing a “******,” to understand the man as Other and himself and his uncle as people who belong to society.
Blackness remains the great challenge to writers of fiction on all sides of the color line, for the central role of race in American Othering affects us all, white and nonwhite, black and nonblack, not just writers who are white. Morrison describes her own struggles with color codes in her work, notably in her novelsParadise (1997) and Home (2012), and her story and play Recitatif (1983). “Writing non-colorist literature about black people,” she writes, “is a task I have found both liberating and hard.” Non-colorist literature does not make racial identity do the work of character creation. Characters may have racial identities—in the USA, race is too salient a part of experience to overlook. But race should not decide how a character acts or thinks or speaks or looks.
Morrison articulates her determination “to de-fang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself.” But it is far from easy. The actors in Recitatif, like editors and many readers, want to identify characters by race—a crucial ingredient of American identity, but one defined by generalizations rooted in the history of slavery and too facilely evoked through recognizable stereotypes. Racial identification, invented to serve needs of subjugation, can diminish a character’s individual specificity, that hallmark of Morrison’s brilliance.
Where Morrison identifies race, she struggles against the expectations of race.Paradise begins with color—“They shoot the white girl first.” But she never says which of the women in the group under attack is white, and offers almost no clues. (“Some readers have told me of their guess,” Morrison reveals in The Origin of Others, “but only one of them was ever correct.”) Paradise turns to themes of black colorism’s purity requirements and misogyny, the deadly means of Othering that Morrison’s characters employ. Colorism appears early on in the novel with wealth; in 1890, members of an established black community turn away a group of freedmen deemed too poor and too dark. The freedmen go on to found the town of Haven and its successor, Ruby, and from that moment up to the novel’s present in the 1970s, they pride themselves on their unadulterated blackness. Nearby, a group of women, seeking refuge from unhappy pasts, move into an old convent. One source of the Ruby men’s murderous hatred of the women is their racial heterogeneity—their utter lack of racial purity. But that is not the only source: In Paradise, misogyny fuels the hatred that kills.
Looking back on Home, Morrison admits to misgivings. It was a mistake, she concludes, to accede to her editor’s request for color-coding the main character, Frank Money. A minor mistake, for Money’s race only appears obliquely, after a two-page description of the hospital he is leaving. A reader would have to know that in the tiny AME Zion church that succors Money, AME means African Methodist Episcopal. A few pages later, the reader would need to grasp the meaning of he “won’t be able to sit down at any bus stop counter.” If Morrison lost the struggle between individual characterization and racial identification, which not only flattens out characters but also furthers racist habits of thought, it was just barely. Throughout her career, Morrison has confronted those habits and broken them down, not just in her own writing but also in her work as an editor.
In her 19 years at Random House, Morrison made known the stories of a variety of specific lives and their individual identities. She published biographies of the writer Toni Cade Bambara, the activist-scholar Angela Davis, and the athlete Muhammad Ali. In 1974, she published a nonfiction anthology: The Black Book, a scrapbook of black history drawn from the collection of Middleton A. Harris, who also served as its editor. There readers discovered photographs of black soldiers in impeccable uniforms, black families in their Sunday best, patents for typewriters and laundry machines, and early black movie stars, along with postcards of smiling white people at a lynching. The abundance and variety of material relating to the history of people of African descent in The Black Book opened millions of eyes to diversity within blackness, a crucial step in loosening the grip of American apartheid.
Long read, continue to full story: Toni Morrison's Radical Vision of Otherness
