Toni Morrison Has Died

Whitewashing the proud boys:

> The proud boys are a strange white power group when they have prominent black members.

Claiming UKIP aren't racist because they are 'normal' people:

> Have you actually talked to many UKIP supporters? I've spoken to UKIP when they knocked on the door and they seemed like pretty normal people.

(I'm sure they're normal, but they're also racists)

Claiming apparent race-baiting:

> As for the the actual article you linked, the author herself has nice race-bait titles of work

Comparing criticisms of historic oppression in science to Nazi Germany:

> There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.'

I might not call you a racist, but you're sure carrying a lot of water for them.

Unrelated, but it's kind of scary how many comments have, if not an undertone, just straight up racism.

There's a great profile of the editor Robert Gottlieb who worked with her, including a few wonderful quotes from Toni Morrison revealing how she worked (search the page for "Morrison"; there are about 10 quotes), from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20161227170954/http://www.thepar... — the whole thing is a great read even if you don't care about Toni Morrison (every lover of reading is likely to enjoy it), but if you do, it may just be a few snippets that you might have otherwise missed as it's not “about” Toni Morrison.

> [Morrison] Writing my first two books, The Bluest Eye and Sula, I had the anxiety of a new writer who needs to make sure every sentence is exactly the right one. Sometimes that produces a kind of precious, jeweled quality—a tightness, which I particularly wanted in Sula. Then after I finished Sula and was working on the third book, Song of Solomon, Bob said to me, You can loosen, open up. Your writing doesn’t have to be so contained; it can be wider. I’m not sure these were his exact words, but I know that the consequence of the remarks was that I did relax and begin to open up to possibilities. It was because I was able to open up to those possibilities that I began to think things like, What would happen if indeed I followed this strange notion or image or picture I had in my mind of this woman who had no navel . . . whereas normally I would have dismissed such an idea as recklessness. It was as if he had said, Be reckless in your imagination.

> [Gottlieb] I remember the discussion with Toni as she was beginning Song of Solomon, because although we always did some marginal cosmetic work on her manuscripts, obviously a writer of her powers and discrimination doesn’t need a lot of help with her prose. I think I served Toni best by encouraging her—helping to free her to be herself. The only other real help I gave to her was noneditorial: I encouraged her to stop editing and to write full-time, something I knew she wanted to do. As I remember it, I reassured her about her finances—but what I was really saying was, You’re not an editor who does some writing, you’re a writer—acknowledge it; there’s nothing to be scared of. We always understood each other—two editors, two lovers of reading, and exactly the same age.

[…]

> [Morrison] Writing for me is just a very sustained process of reading. The only difference is that writing a book might take three or four years, and I’m doing it. I never wrote a line until after I became an editor, and only then because I wanted to read something that I couldn’t find. That was the first book I wrote.

A good parallel might be the love many Westerners have for anime.