Toni Morrison and the pernicious fruits of racism

As I mentioned yesterday, Toni Morrison writes about the black experience in America as truly and honestly as any writer I know, including Mark Twain, who wrote the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, about slavery and the ignorant white culture that supported it, as seen through the eyes of the title character, Huck Finn, and its archetypal hero, Nigger Jim.

The Bluest Eye is Morrison's attempt to deal with the issue of "racial beauty". The book was inspired by the memory of an elementary school classmate saying she "wanted blue eyes". Here's how Morrison describes the book:

"The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that; to say somehting about why she had not, or possibly ever would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. Implicict in her desire was racial self-loathing. .... Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was?

... "I focused therefore on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female."

In his 1999 review of The Bluest Eye, Cat Moses cites the effect of blues music on the book's narrative tone and structure:

"Morrison has stated that her narrative 'effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music... ' The Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort 'to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization'. "

The blues music culture pioneered by poor rural blacks was once as reviled by mainstream whites as the hip-hop culture of young urban blacks is today. Only today, the white mainstream includes many middle class blacks as well.

Ironically, Toni Morrison graduated in 1953 from Howard University, the site of Bill Cosby's contentious and controversial remarks.

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[Juno Mindoes]

According to a previous source of ours, we have been told that Apple in fact has no plans to release the white model iPhone 4. Our source hypothesizes another "delay" communicated around March leading us into an iPhone 5 release time-frame in June / July.