Playing in the Dark

by Toni Morrison

a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.

But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.

equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.

A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only “universal” but also “race-free” risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.

for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive.

An instructive parallel to this willed scholarly indifference is the centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse and the way in which women and women’s issues were read (or unread). Blatant sexist readings are on the decline, and where they still exist they have little effect because of the successful appropriation by women of their own discourse.

individualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency.