Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
by Toni Morrison
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Steiner, Wendy.   “The Clearest Eye.”  Rev. of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.  By Toni Morrison.   Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.    New York Review of Books 5 Apr.  1992, late ed.   Online Books.   New York Times Co., 1997. <http://www.nytimes.com/>

“TONI MORRISON is both a great novelist and the closest thing the country has to a national writer.  The fact that she speaks as a woman and a black only enhances her ability to speak as an American, for the path to a common voice nowadays runs through the partisan.  In her novel "Beloved," for example, Ms.  Morrison restores to the collective memory a particular strand of its emotive past, turning a story of former slaves into what amounts to a national epic.  Though it is "not a story to pass on," she offers everyone -- not just those injured -- the chance to feel the pain, the injustice and the need for healing. 

"Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination was first presented as a series of lectures at Harvard University.  Here, Ms.  Morrison invites literary scholars to carry on her generous task of making the black experience resonant for all Americans.  Black characters in classic American novels, she maintains, have been as marginalized as their real-life counterparts.  The "shadow" darkening American fiction, in her view, has been a critical non-topic because "the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture." But "excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly.  .  .  .  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," she says.  "All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes" .  .  .  . 

[Morrison outlines four topics for American Africanist research in Playing in the Dark.   The fourth topic]

“.  .  .  concerns the use of stories of slavery and rejection "as a means of meditation -- both safe and risky -- on one's own humanity.  Such analyses will reveal how the representation and appropriation of that narrative provides opportunities to contemplate limitation, suffering, rebellion, and to speculate on fate and destiny .  .  .  ethics, social and universal codes of behavior, and assertions about and definitions of civilization and reason."

[In Beloved, Morrison presents] “.  .  .  .  Sethe's problem .  .  .  as not only the cruelty of white slave owners but Sethe's own guilt and lack of self-esteem as well.  Despite her crossing the Ohio border to emancipation, Sethe cannot become free until she frees herself, until she realizes that she is "her best thing."   In Playing in the Dark  Ms.  Morrison, in effect, takes the next step of imagining the white Schoolteacher who treated her heroine like an animal in that barn.   She looks to see how his culture constructed him in literature, and finding the task unmanageable all on her own, she suggests it for the critical community at large.   Ms.  Morrison's Africanism is meant to teach a black author about white motivation.   It should also teach whites about how they have constructed not only black but white identity, and how they have contemplated their own humanity by observing the dehumanization of others.