Race, Other and Self

I was very interested by some of Toni Morrison’s arguments in Playing in the Dark, and, after reading many of her texts throughout my life, I can see new angles from her works. I was really interested by two of her arguments in particular:

At the beginning of the year, we were talking about how the Internet is a place that does not need to recognize race, as it does not matter there. This issue has come up constantly throughout this semester and Morrison brings this matter up once again when she states that “a criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist” (12.) Why do many people think that by recognizing race, racism has to be attached? In a non-discriminatory way, we can recognize the race of an artist/writer/performer in order to clearly illustrate the story or the deeper meaning behind their races. Why are we so scared to delve deeper into what could be something from which we could learn much, but instead we just want it to be smooth like a white linoleum floor?

The second point I found to be extremely interesting, has again, been brought up in previous discussions about the racialized other vs. the self. How we portray/create the idea of the other is very important, as it shows a lot about how we portray/create the idea of the self. Since “one sees how the concept of the American self was similarly bound to Africanism [a.k.a. the other], and was similarly covert about its dependency” (57-58,) we can also see how the other and the self are so intertwined. It is not that we see the other as someone who is “not us,” but instead, we create the classification of the self as someone who is “not them.” By placing the othered individual further and further away from what one does not want to be, one solidifies his personal image by putting the other at arms length. However, he still has to hold on to the other to show what he is not.