Masters without slaves?

Toni Morrison calls white freedom "parasitical" (57). The same could be said of male freedom, heterosexual freedom, etc. So, is freedom possible without this parasitism? Is it possible to affirm the freedom of someone without disaffirming the freedom of someone else? If there's no "us" and no "them," is there anyone?

The answer, according to Morrison, seems to be no: "Freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing, and mutating presence of a black slave" (52). This leads me to the conclusion that the only way to escape the current unequal definition of freedom is to escape the current definition of the human. There's a reason the human, defined as free, evolved as a concept around the same time as race. Race is a part of this formulation of humanity — not just race, but racism. The very definition of freedom depended, still depends, on being not a slave. There is no master without slaves. Therefore, we cannot all be masters. There has to be a definition of the human that does not contain mastery. If there's no "us" without "them," to stop othering people requires no more subject. People have to be seen as multiple and other to themselves, and to view others as pieces of themselves (this ties into melancholia as well as the decline of presence and singularity).

After last class, Nathan and I talked about how racism advantages white people. Morrison's discussion of Cather helped me see how the inferior status of other races helps elevate the status of white women. Like a parent repeating habits observed as a child, women dominated by white men can reverse this power dynamic by dominating people of color. This made me think of how the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention during the early women's movement included, in a list of women's grievances about patriarchal society, "He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners" (obviously, "her" meant someone white).

One tension in the way that Morrison talks about the interdependence of blackness and whiteness occurs when she says whiteness is constructed as meaningless (59), yet blackness is constructed as historyless and contextless (53). How is it that white is the race rendered meaningless, yet black is the race whose background is rendered meaningless? How are these two constructs related?

After thinking about how my life is influenced by race (as a white person), I am somewhat aware of how racism has advantaged me but less clear on how it has disadvantaged me (see Ms. Education's post). I'd really appreciate if we could discuss how our personal experiences relate to the topics we've talked about in this course, especially how race has affected people in unexpected ways (such as negatively affecting people at the top of the hierarchy).