Toni Morrison published her slim non-fiction meditation, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, in 1993. The historical context shimmers in my memory. In 1991, my graduate cohort analyzed every moment of Anita Hill’s testimony about her harrowing harassment from then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In response, 1992 ushered in the “Year of the Woman,” with a record number of women being elected and re-elected to the Senate. In those years, people everywhere were talking about narratives about sexism and racism that haunted American culture. Without explicitly referencing those political touchstones, Morrison published Playing in the Dark the next year, to challenge readers to consider all the ways language shapes our literary, cultural, and political imaginations.
Just after the recent election, I taught the Preface and Chapter One of Playing in the Dark to my writing students. I was moved to hear from them how relevant they find Morrison’s insights, now. Morrison writes specifically about the ways racism haunts the sentences and plot lines — often through pointed silences — of celebrated literary classics written by white writers, from Edgar Alan Poe, to Henry James, to William Faulkner, to Flannery O’Connor.
Morrison guides readers through her own process of learning to see the repression and functions of Blackness as tools for moving forward white characters’ development. Morrison offers many examples of Black characters who function only to turn the plot, including the Countess in James' What Maisie Knew (13). These are active writerly choices, Morrison argues. Those choices have cultural and political weight that affect both victims of racism and those who perpetuate the racism (11). In other words, as my students concluded after some discussion, Morrison shows us why, as both readers and writers, we must take language seriously. Our language shapes our entire world views.
Morrison locates her own readerly awakening as the moment when she "stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer” (15). She continues, “Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it” (16). Morrison calls both writers and readers to action: Every writerly decision we make — and learn to pay attention to as readers — builds a world of consequences.
This crucial insight — that we must learn to “read as writers” and “write as readers” — is the central tenet of From Inquiry to Academic Writing (5e), my co-authored book with Stuart Greene. We scaffold for students specific steps for the reading approach Toni Morrison calls for in literary texts, with an eye for the implications of every writerly decision in academic texts. These steps strengthen critical reading strategies, of course; that’s what we mean by “reading as a writer.” But the steps also help students name the decisions and moves of academic writing so that they can practice them in their own writing, with real readers in mind; that what's we mean by “writing as a reader."
Here is our five-step Rhetorical Analysis assignment (62), which can be adapted to many different assignments:
- Identify the situation. What motivates the writer to write?
- Identify the writer's purpose. What does the writer want readers to do or think about?
- Identify the writer's claims. What is the writer's main claim? What minor claims does the writer make?
- Identify appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. How does the writer establish credibility, develop a relationship with readers, and use evidence to support a claim?
- Identify the writer's audience. What do you know about the writer's audience? What does the writer's language imply about the readers? What about the writer's references? The structure of the text?
These steps can help students with any level of expertise flex the necessary muscles to be more effective readers and writers, and to understand the consequences of every word choice.
As Morrison reminds us — and my students affirm — those consequences for our cultural and political imaginations can be dire, or downright inspiring.
