Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is the author of "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," as well as the voice of the narrator. Toni Morrison's reading of "The Words to Say It" in 1983 sparks her interest in cataloging the way that black people ignite moments of discovery in literature not written by them. The main reason that these matters are so important to Morrison is because blackness and black people do not stimulate the same notions of dread, anarchy or love for her. As a black writer, she struggles with a language that evokes hidden signs of racial superiority. It is a common assumption that all readers of American literature are white, and Morrison wonders what such an assumption has meant to the literary imagination. She ponders how literary whiteness and blackness are made and what the consequences are of such a construction. Toni Morrison argues for...