Practicing Intellectual Judo:

The Challenge of Toni Morrison to White Supremacy Thought (Part 1)

By: Royal Star Allah

Quality. When interacting with any intellectual offering crafted by Toni Morrison, I experience a few pangs of intimidation. Her delivery, meaning the tone of her presentation, belies the ferocity of her insights. Everything she says and does lands as calculated for maximum receptivity in the face of recalcitrant resistance. She knows how she, as a Black woman, is perceived in the collective subconscious of “white America” and adjusts. Yet, I don’t receive the impression that Professor Morrison is code-switching. Quite the contrary, the carefully cultivated presentation is designed to compensate for the blindspots the United States socialization process produces.

Photo by Loc Dang

It is not she who has a problem. “White” people have a problem.

Or, is it, have (are?) the problem?

In 1993, PBS talk show host Charlie Rose encountered Professor Morrison’s capacity to practice intellectual judo when discussing the mechanics of “American” society. Like most “white” men, he approached the subject as if equality exists automatically and inequality is a deviation from equality, not the other way around. He brings the belief to the discussion that European American behavior - colonialism, enslavement, segregation and multiculturalism - produces (somehow!) a meritocracy, generation to generation. Every comment out of his mouth is as if equality is happening between him and Professor Morrison.

And, this is where confusion appears to reign because the two of them encounter the paradox of the racial caste system. For Rose, he experiences the common ground of the “intellect.” And, to a certain extent, this is true.

Charlie Rose: Arthur Ashe was here. The late Arthur Ashe. And, he said to me; as he said in one other place in a much quoted comment, he said: living with AIDS is easier than living with racism. It’s a harder struggle against racism for me than it is against AIDS. What is meant to me is that there’s no way for the rest of us to understand that daily encounter. Which brings me to my question for you. Do you still have that encounter? Do you, Toni Morrison, Pulitzer Prize winner, successful, honored in the halls of academia, etcetera, still have that encounter?

Toni Morrison: Yes, I do, Charlie, but, let me add, tell you that’s the wrong question.

Rose: Okay. What’s the right question?

Morrison: How do you feel? [1]

Is there common ground? Yes, they are human beings. Yes, both of them are educated. Yes, they are both so accomplished, they were being heavily distributed by a major media outlet. Yet, absent from Mr. Rose’s mind is the racial power dynamic between them. Everything that Professor Morrison states in defiance of Mr. Rose “agenda” is courageous. Every negative reaction, or confusion, from Mr. Rose is a veiled physical threat, or skates the edge of a threat.

In Professor Morrison’s mind, racism is the byproduct of mass insecurity that is imposed, by tremendous violence, upon Black people. European Americans do not know who they are outside the aristocratic deference bequeath them by white racial violence. The practice of lynching in Southern states and the economic deprivation in Northern states affect how Black people can interact with European Americans. A range exists. To feel “safe,” the European American needs Black people to “bow down.” To feel successful, European Americans need the social order to prevent the marketplace distributing Black genius.

This paradigm-shift leaves Mr. Rose vulnerable. Professor Morrison refuses to play the game of white supremacy. She is focused on her literary work and being fully human. She doesn’t need validation from Mr. Rose or any other European American person/institution. (When making that statement, I am not referencing the strength that most European Americans assign to individualism. By validation, I mean, Professor Morrison does not need Rose to acknowledge or accept her essential humanity. In many ways, Professor Morrison does not believe European Americans possess the capacity to acknowledge, or accept, her humanity!)

Perhaps, due to the quality of her intellectual offerings, perhaps because of her delivery style or perhaps out of shame, Toni Morrison was “awarded” the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel, The Bluest Eye.

Directly because European Americans recognized her genius, Professor Morrison was invited to deliver three lectures in 1990. Two years later, those lectures were transcribed into a book entitled, “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.”

The book hit the stores approximately two months before the Rodney King riots, on April 29, 1992. I remember that year. It was my senior year of high school. I was radicalized by the “mania” around Spike Lee’s movie about Minister Malcolm X’s life.

It was a hard time. Articulating why wasn’t the hard part. The 18 year old version of me found having to articulate the pain, in the first place, as the hard part. It was as if my fellow European American students were not living through the same current events that I, and my fellow “African American” students were living through. To drive my point home, conversation with “white” classmates felt useless because they did not see themselves reflected, like I and my Black friends did, in the face of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Nor did they see our Black bodies reflected in the face and body of Rodney King. They spoke as if strangely disconnected from anything other than their own personality. If the act did not flow off their own hands, the act was not connected to them. And, likewise, in their minds, if oppression was not immediately happening to us, to our Black bodies, then, we did not have to (a right?) to relate to the act of oppression.

I don’t remember learning or watching any promotional interviews about Professor Toni Morrison’s book in 1992. If I had known about it, I am certain I would have read it, due to my need for confirmation that I wasn’t crazy.

Considering how receptive to this material my younger self would have been, does it count as a thought experiment for me to wonder, in my old age, what it felt like to sit in the collegiate audience while Professor Morrison taught? I like to imagine that I possess enough source material to be the camera man inside my imagination and construct an image of her sitting on a stage, rather than standing at a podium. Her aura is regal, with her locs like a lion’s mane. She is carrying in her person the confidence of having to be twice as good to go half as far as a “white person.”

She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, [2] on February 18, 1931 in the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio. Her father, George Wofford, like millions of Black people, was greatly affected by the KKK’s reign of terror in the Deep South and joined the “Great Migration,” as we Black historians call it, into the Northern states. [3] While finding a racially integrated city during the Great Depression might land as hopeful to those living in the 21st century and in desperate need of soothing that “non-racist” European Americans have always existed, Professor Morrison claims the landlord set fire to the family home when she was only two years old because her father was unable to pay rent. [4] Similar to Minister Malcolm X’s earliest childhood memory, the Wofford family was inside of the house when the landlord set it afire. So used to white racial violence, Professor Morrison’s parental reaction to this act of terror was to laugh, rather than descend into fear and despair. This was just how “white people” treated Black people: with unmitigated violence. Considering such, Professor Morrison’s stance towards “whiteness” and “white people” comes into view.

She graduated from Howard, a historical Black college, in 1953, with a B.A. in English. She completed her Master’s in American literature in 1955, the same year the Montgomery Bus Boycott started. This means the first 24 years of her life were spent under segregation.

She published her first novel at the age of 39, under “integration” in 1970, after Dr. King was assassinated.

When contemplating the art of writing, several questions haunt Professor Morrison. The first lies in the act of reading. Questioning “reading” itself might be a singularly Black inquiry. On this front, I do not know if the equivalent exists for those who struggle with English through the lens of it as a second language, like the bilingual or deaf communities. My ignorance is based - solely - on my socialization inside of the United States. I do know that, by the hands of European Americans, mine Ancestors were systematically denied the right (publicly and privately) to the literacy skill set. Under that light, Professor Morrison’s inquiry is “on brand.” She does not wish to betray herself.

As we have seen in the fight over CRT following Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin’s casual killing of George Floyd or the word “woke,” those who occupy the oppressor caste can redefine the nature (and acts) of their oppression. The behavior screams, “I don’t want to feel bad about myself!” From what I can observe, it is as if the individual European American knows oppression is happening, yet, does not wish to be treated as they are, personally, the cause/source of said oppression. The individual personality begs “Black people” to treat them as “innocent”; to give them a chance to prove they are not racist; to imagine/accept that “emotional/intellectual pain” is the same as “physical oppression.” Meaning, a Black person being afraid that the “white” person in front of them can be as “cold-hearted” as Derek Chauvin and “murder” a Black person without feeling any remorse is perceived by the European American as “Black supremacy” or “reverse racism,” i.e. an emotional/intellectual act of oppression equivalent to Chauvin’s physical act.

All that being said, “Blackness” in the hands of an European American is totally different than how it flows from a Black person’s pen. One is an abstract concept, juxtaposed against “self,” whereas for the second position, “Blackness” is the affirmation of self as “human.”

Professor Morrison opines in the introduction of her book, “Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. . . . Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks it own gates, pollutes its vision.” (page xi) “For reasons that I should not need explanation here, until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. . . . I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination.” (page xii) [5]

That is Professor Morrison’s thesis. It is a “concept” lost on my high school classmates. Thirty years later, it is a concept that remains lost on millions of European Americans who voted for Mr. Trump’s second Administration. The concept that “humanity” is greater than what they have “experienced” is an inquiry beyond their capacity to investigate.

Or, this is what I have observed so far, in my lifetime.

1. *Toni Morrison interview on "Beloved" (1987)* [Video]. (2012, October 11). YouTube.

2. Morrison, T. (2007). *The bluest eye* (Vintage International ed., p. 38). Vintage. (Original work published 1970)

3. Smith, D. (2015, April 8). The radical vision of Toni Morrison. *The New York Times Magazine*.

4. Morrison, T. (1993, April 7). *Interview with Toni Morrison* [Video]. YouTube.

5. Morrison, T. (1992). *Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination*. Harvard University Press.