Whiteness In William Morrison: The Loss Of Language And Discrimination
994 Words4 Pages
Morrison explains, “The horror of whites was convulsive but abstract” (paradise 189). Whiteness, the concept and ideal, became an internalized border with in African Americans that established itself in towns names “fairly”. The future members of Haven saw that the indication of racial purity that they had taken for granted had become a stain (194). In her fiction and criticism, Morrison seeks to challenge dominant deductions about race and its relation to gender. The instance of Armstrong verdict demonstrates what happens when blackness is considered as an epitome only, rather than an abstraction that gets mapped into the world and onto specific bodies for Rehnquist and other supreme court Justices, how blackness gets mapped onto geography, clothing, and drug…show more content… For Connie, he first to go was the essentials of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the vale between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second (242). Such an observation may suggest that Connie has “lost” access to her native tongue and cannot assert racial or ethnic authenticity. Morrison, however, links this loss of language with gaining special, magical abilities. It is this loss of language that heads her being “tricked into raising the dead” (242). Soon thereafter, Lone begins to instruct Connie magic (244). Lone, too, is known as a healer and midwife within Ruby (270-73). Like Connie, Lone does not know her history and has been apparently cut off from her people. However, she possesses healing powers. “Lone did know something more profound than Morgan memory or Pat Best's history book. She knew what neither memory nor history can say or record: the ‘trick’ of life and its ‘reason’ ” (272). Sitting near a lawn house where her mother died, Lone was found during the 1890 trek to Haven. Fairy is determined that they take her with them, and she successfully convinced the townspeople to