Status Updates From Language as Liberation: Ref...

Reading about how Faulkner deliberately withheld visual cues of race to obscure yet force one’s focus onto his character’s Blackness gives me a deeper understanding of why Morrison wrote “Recitatif.”

White Americans desperately need difference—in the form of an emotional, unintelligent, sexual, and debased Africanist presence—to define themselves, and if that is the whitest thing I’ve heard all week, I don’t know what else is.

'If race is hidden, and we are forced to find it, then we learn not much about race, but a great deal about racist discourse. Faulkner serves up to us this racist discourse in all its futility, madness, incoherence and obsessiveness.'

'... like other American writers, especially those we associate with modernism, [Gertrude] Stein felt free to experiment with sexuality in narrative, felt the subject palatable if the object upon which these experiments are carried is Africanist.'

'... good slaveowners are good to their slaves and are simply trapped by the system of slavery - not racism;'

'The enabling role of Africanism for men becomes disabling for women. What supports white male hegemony does not seem to offer similar support to white women'

'He read Swift, discussed the Christian commandment to "love one another" and is described as "strangely" insensitive to the suffering of his slaves.'

'... at the heart of the American enterprise was the construction of a new, white male.'

'This book grew from the belief that my mother's teaching materials, her lectures, essays, and notes to students, deserve to stand with her published work.'

Hahaha, Harriet Beecher Stowe was doing the white feminist, “I DoN’T SeE cOlOr,” “let’s affirm our PrOgReSsIvEnEsS by shedding tears over slaves,” “feel better about your white guilt by reading a book about CoLoReD pPl” shtick 100 years before it became mainstream, and Morrison calls her on it.

Love this.

Yeah, so Morrison is basically like, There’s no possible way to overthink the sociopolitical implications of language in storytelling, and I love her all the more for validating my thoughts of the last 25 years.

This is like having the privilege of sitting in on Morrison’s university classes. Amazing.