lunabbly 's review for:

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
5.0
Highly, highly recommend reading. I love the way that Morrison writes and explains her ideas, deconstructs tropes, and refolds narratives and puts them into a culturally radical perspective -- one that completely demolishes race and the racial hierarchy while examining how whiteness is the absence of culture and critiquing its passive and active violence on culture, people of color, and white people.

Many quotes resonated with me:
"...struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of people and language, which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowledgable in my work. My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing Blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains" (x-xi).


"... escape from Old World was 'escape from license' - from a society perceived to be unacceptably permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined - for those fleeing for reasons other than religious ones, constraint and limitation impelled the journey. All the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty, prison, social ostracism, and death. [...] Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the 'clean slate' variety, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again but to be born again in new clothes. [...] The desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God's Law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall to poverty, hunger, and debt" (33-35).


"Nothing highlighted freedom - if it did not in fact create it - like slavery" (38).
"Knowledge, however mundane and utilitarian, plays about in linguistic images and forms cultural practice" (49).


"The ideological dependence on racialism is intact and, like its metaphysical existence, offers in historical, political, and literary discourse a safe route into meditations on morality and ethics; a way of examining the mind-body dichotomy; a way of thinking about justice; a way of contemplating the modern world" (64).


Morrison just explains it all so well and explores in-depth the taking that whiteness claims and how whiteness claims the voidness of Blackness and Africanism. Whiteness wants to swallow whole culture and people. I'm not sure if this is what Morrison is saying, but that's what I'm taking away from this book.

So many good, savory moments of realization and things connecting for me with regards to how we're not necessarily facing a racial problem, but a cultural (or metaphysical as Morrison describes it) problem and how racialism has taken form to shape culture / metaphysics to disrupt care, love, compassion, and just being.