The novelist and Nobel Laureate died today at 88. Her recent essays called out white supremacy and offered a blueprint for fighting it.
Toni Morrison, a giant of literature and a towering voice for black lives and identities, died today at 88. She was a novelist, essayist, and teacher; she was the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was a guiding light for many black writers, including this one.
She used her art and platform to hold a mirror to a troubled world to show us our true selves. It is a monumental loss.
No doubt your feeds are filled with tributes, clips,
In 2016, Morrison wrote an essay for The New Yorker as part of a series on the election of President Donald Trump. “Mourning for Whiteness,” reminds us that nothing we’re experiencing is new.
“This is a serious project,” she begins. “All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of ‘Americanness’ is color.”
White Americans are taking reluctant action, she explains, to stave off the collapse of white privilege by justifying the full embrace of “a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength.”
In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.
In 2015, facing a different existential threat, Morrison wrote an essay for The Nation’s 150th anniversary issue. She recalled the advice she got when she confessed to a friend a moment of paralyzing dread at the state of the world in 2004. It was a different election, but an eerily similar time. Instead, she got a different shock to her system. “I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: ‘No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!’”
In this contemporary world of violent protests, internecine war, cries for food and peace, in which whole desert cities are thrown up to shelter the dispossessed, abandoned, terrified populations running for their lives and the breath of their children, what are we (the so-called civilized) to do…?
Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.
Rest in power, Ms. Morrison. The rest of us, let’s go to work.
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