Monday, April 25, 2011
Foot: My Opinion on Toni Morrison
Every year I am forced to read Beloved by Toni Morrison and listen to teachers talk about how she is such a great author. I'm not commenting on her writing skills, but her message is that of broad sweeping generalizations and a never ending debt. What has Toni Morrison ever done to improve race relations? Nothing, she profits off of racism and discrimination, she needs for peoplle to believe that racism is alive and well to continue to do what she does. She wants us to believe that all white people are guilty for rich settlers did hundred of years ago , "She has unleashed a firestorm of vituperation against white America for the suffering of black slaves and their descendants"(McMichael, 2008). Her only goal is to convince all her readers that today's Black's lives are dictated by the actions of slave masters hundreds of years ago. I'm sure any politically correct person out there reading this is thinking I am a bigot, this couldn't be further from the case, but I can tell an author trying to manipulate people into believing what they want them to. It just bothers me that she is so against racism and slavery, yet she has made a career out of convincing people that these subjects should dictate peoples' lives today. Also, her analogy of killing a child to protect it from slavery bothers me, a mother should never kill her child, it is the most backwards thing that defies nature to the core, Morrison uses the shock effect in all of her work to burn ugly images of white people into the minds of her readers. Toni Morison is racist against modern white people, if any white author made a career out of talking about how inhumane aspects of former black culture were they would be labeled a racist, if she wanted to make a difference for the better she would try to mend fences between the races instead of placing blame.
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I couldn't disagree with you more. It is my belief that literature should be used to address social issues of the past and present and provide a message to readers. Toni Morrison has written about slavery to show people the evils of that institution. The killing of the child demonstrated how evil slavery was and that the mother believed that death would be a better fate than slavery. Toni Morrison is not a sensationalist. The fictional events she wrote about describing slavery were based off real events that actually happened. In slavery women were raped and tortured, people were killed, all of this was true. Are you saying that people should never speak or write about horrible historical events because they are simply trying to make a profit off of it? By that logic, people should never write about any historical tragedy because they are doing it for a profit. Never once has Toni Morrison placed any blame on today's whites for slavery. Writing books about slavery in no way places blame on today's whites. Furthermore, I believe Beloved was a beautifully written book because of the ways in which the characters handled such harsh conditions. Furthermore, racism is still rampant throughout the United States today, it just isn't as blatant as before. Look at certain laws and the criminal justice system and there is racism all over the place. I just don't see how writing about slavery makes someone racist against whites.
ReplyDeleteI never said writing about slavery was wrong, I said she has made a career out of it, all she has ever focsued on was the negative aspects of life, look at all of her works she has ever written. In my original post I talked about mending race reatlions and having these dialogues, so don't say that I don't think people ought to talk about slavery, I made this post to have these type of discussions. My main point is that Toni Morrison never offers any solutions, and for as valuable as it is to know and be aware of the atrocities of our nation's past, this is something that student's study every year in some aspect for 12 years of school, and then while they are in college courses, do you have any ideas how many other human atrocities we dont talk about once in a whole school career, like the genocide of my 1.2 million of my ancestors in Armercina at the hands of Turks.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this would be a good book to have students read and then they can come up with some kind of solution and write a letter to the mayor or congressman or something. Use this book to get students to think about solutions.
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