Toni Morrison and the Trajectory of Racism in the US: from 1995 to the Present and Beyond
By Steven Jonas
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was one of the best known and highly honored U.S. novelists of the 20th century and into the 21st. Indeed, she won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. As her Wikipedia entry says , “Morrison’s works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States.” As is well-known now she is very much back in the news, for her perhaps most famous work, “Beloved,” is back in the news. (So much so, in fact, although hardly what the racist-users of the book for propaganda intended, the title was, at this time of writing, among the 50 top sellers on Amazon’s novels list.)
The novel has some very graphic scenes of the particular horrors of one of the two leading horrors of U.S. history, slavery (the other of course being the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples). Some years ago, the book was assigned as reading in a last-semester high school advanced placement course in a Virginia school. (That was in 2012.) One student took great exception to it. (To what exactly, one doesn’t know: — slavery; its depiction; violent acts inflicted directly or indirectly on slaves; or perhaps it was teaching about a central element in U.S. history that he either didn’t want to know about or was being presented with differently than the “Lost Cause” narrative to which he might have been exposed in his racist [see next paragraph] home, which featured slavery as one just happy time for everyone involved).
At the time, the student’s mother took great exception to the book being included in a high school course, even an advanced placement one (much like college), and with one or more Republican candidates, made a big political issue of it. The current GOP candidate for Governor of Virginia, Donald Trump, oops I mean Glen Youngkin, is making an issue of it again, and is using an ad (or a remake of it) featuring the outraged-that-her-son-should-be-exposed-to-the horrors-of-slavery mother in his campaign. Youngkin, like any modern Republican going back to Goldwater, always has race and racism in his back pocket (see: “Xenophobia and Racism: They’re in the Republican Party’s DNA“). Trying to hide them just a bit during the campaign, now he has his racism cards openly on the table. And they may very well win for him, especially because he is not running against a particularly strong candidate (but that’s another story).
Interestingly enough, back in 1995, Toni Morrison spelled out in some detail just how a progression to fascism could occur in the United States, using racism as the point of the spear. I used her description of racism as it had been and was being used politically, in my 1996 “future history,” The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, republished in 2013 under the title: The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S.: 1981-2022. This “history-from-the-future” was purportedly published in 2048 on the 25th anniversary of the “Restoration of U.S. Constitutional Democracy” at the conclusion of the Second Civil War. It retails the progression of the United States to an apartheid state, called The New American Republics, driven by a Republican Party which has racism, and then Christian Nationalism, at its core.
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Source: OpEdNews