Toni Morrison on her newest book

Video interview here. You might have to make a New York Times login and password to view it. (I'm not sure because my browser automatically runs all the password cookies my wife puts in when she looks at news websites for her job.)

Notice Morrison overlaps one of the points I made in class last week, which is that the modern version of racism didn't really exist prior to the 1700s. This doesn't mean people weren't a**holes back then, but they were certainly a**holes in a very different way.

The other thing that's interesting is that you can see how she has widened the historical scope you get in her earlier books, like Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. In Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, which are her best books, either the flashbacks or the main plots spend a lot of time in the 1800s. Apparently this new book, A Mercy, is mostly set in the 1600s. If there's one thing we've learned in this course, it's that ideas can be very deeply rooted. One way to challenge deeply rooted ideas, as we discussed last week is to show how they are artificial, in other words how they are just certain ideas you might have rather than the absolute true ideas that "everyone" has. Another way is to write what we might call corrective or revisionist histories of the origin of those ideas. Because one of the main ways that any ideology justifies itself - and racism is a good example - is to pretend that it has always existed, that it is a natural norm, and to erase the evidence that there was a time before it existed, when people thought about things differently.