Steph | bookedinsaigon’s Reviews > Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon > Status Update

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.

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.

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.