Toni Morrison & Race

 This one might be more for me than for you. I remain awed by Morrison - the last of the Midwestern writers to hit the big time. This essay comes as I am still trying to work out “Chasing Ashes”. My starting point was, however, Ross Lockridge's Raintree County  where America is a multi-colored swamp; where race is a three-corner affair. The Native Americans are in the background, driven off from Indiana. The following seems to me as proposing the same in the works of Morrison.

When I was in prison a fellow from New Jersey asked if there were Indians in Indiana. He didn't believe me when I said there were none. I knew they had been removed but the details were either forgotten or never known. When I was back here and had access again to Google, I found out the removal happened in the 1840s. My Livingston ancestors got to Ripley County in 1819, and there were still Indians, but when my Hasler ancestors arrived in 1849, they were all gone.

This might be a thing that comes easier to Midwestern writers, that race was not always a black/white dichotomy but had a tripartite nature. Moreover, that it had a settler colonialist nature with genocide as a feature. Although Faulkner touches on the Native Americans expelled from his Mississippi.

We try hiding these facts, and when we cannot, we romanticize or otherwise excuse and deny our history. In my opinion, we do well to face up to our errors and the damage still needing recompense. We cannot let our hypocrisies fester.

 Toni Morrison’s Native Figures: A new reading of race in her novels ( The Yale Review)

When talking to my students about how to make sense of these passages, it is helpful to emphasize that Morrison always distinguished between a character’s beliefs and an author’s. She also adamantly opposed censorship, complaining of the canon wars of the 1980s that they threatened both to destroy a canon precious to her (“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare”) and to degenerate “into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” Nevertheless, I have found one literary “sin” of Morrison’s rather more difficult to defend in these terms: her strange, often awkward representation of Native Americans.

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Whether eager to condemn Morrison or quick to excuse her, these critics all take her analyses of race as a remit to apply that lens to her own writing. To treat literature as if it has a responsibility to fill historical gaps or adjudicate demographic imbalances, however, is to ignore the fact that fictional characters are not sources of historical, sociological, or anthropological truth. They are literary forms, a matter of aesthetic representation, not political representation. A focus on aesthetics is in fact key to Morrison’s close readings in Playing in the Dark, which she says are less about any “particular author’s attitudes toward race” than about “the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence”—one that bears only an oblique relation to the real human beings to whom white writers were responding.

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We know this logic well, and still use it all the time in our discourse on race: there’s white America, and then there’s everybody else, fighting over, assimilating into, or forging solidarity against it. If we were to represent this model visually with regard to European, African, and Native Americans, it might look like a “white” background against which the “black” and the “red” encounter one another, whether in competition or communion. I want to suggest that, with her aesthetic choices in depicting Native American figures, Morrison swaps this schema around. What results is a “red” background over which “black-white” racial relations play. 

Why else this is important: Coming to Terms With History (The Raven Magazine). 

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