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Though Morrison's artistic point-of-view existed outside of the White gaze, it is still very present in the lives of her characters.

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Though Morrison's artistic point-of-view existed outside of the White gaze, it is still very present in the lives of her characters.

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 It is evident in the way they are seen by others: "It's a total absence of human recognition. A glazed separateness right behind the eyes." pg. 51

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 It is evident in the way they are seen by others: "It's a total absence of human recognition. A glazed separateness right behind the eyes." pg. 51

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The scene between the doctors and Mrs. Breedlove (pgs. 16- 18) illustrates how Black people (especially women) are seen as object vs. subject.

Object vs. subject is explored and performed during the encounter between Cholly and the group of White men. (pgs. 54- 56)

Similarly on pgs. 51- 52, the scene between Pecola and Mr. Yacobowski decribes the "separateness" between them.

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- When you read early reviews of Toni's work, those early sympathetic liberal reviewers, and I remember one of them about Sula, and the reviewer says, 'She's got a great talent.

'One day, she won't limit it to 'only writing about black people.'

Like really, it's limiting for her to write about black people?

Like, no one says that when, you know, an Irish writer writes about Irish people.

You know, it's only limiting when you write about black people.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] 'In spite of its richness 'and its thorough originality, one continually feels 'its narrowness, its refusal to brim over 'into the world outside its provincial setting.'

'Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain 'only a marvelous recorder of the black side 'of provincial American life.'

'If she is to maintain the large and serious audience 'she deserves, she is going to have to address 'a riskier contemporary reality.'

- I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people.

I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said, 'One day, she,' meaning me, 'will have to face up 'to the real responsibilities, and get mature, 'and write about the real confrontation 'for black people, which is white people.'

As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

- Toni Morrison's project resides precisely in the effort to discredit the notion that this white male gaze must be omnipresent.

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Toni Morrison On Writing Without the "White Gaze" | American Masters | PBS

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When you read early reviews of Toni's work, those early sympathetic liberal reviewers, and I remember one of them about Sula, and the reviewer says, 'She's got a great talent. 'One day, she won't limit it to 'only writing about black people.' Like really, it's limiting for her to write about black people?

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Excerpt: The White Gaze and Black Female Identity in American Popular Music 

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Excerpt: The White Gaze and Black Female Identity in American Popular Music 

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"Central to the process of racial formation in the United States has been the structuring power of the white gaze.2 Since the advent of European colonialism, it has played a formative role in the making of American society, constructing whiteness and Eurocentric conceptions of the world as normative and superior and portraying non-white perspectives and cultural practices as deviant and inferior. Patricia Hill Collins argues that it has functioned as a part of “technologies of control” in Western societies for centuries. She notes that during Jim Crow, segregationist policies “recognized that all Whites had the power to pinion all Blacks with the power of the White gaze,” and that this phenomenon continues today in more subtle and unverbalized forms.3 Bell hooks draws attention to the unequal, one-way nature of this relationship: “White people can ‘safely’ imagine that they are invisible to black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over black people, accorded them the right to control the black gaze.”4

The effects of the white gaze on black communities and individuals have been manifold. Shanette M. Harris highlights its contribution to ingrained internal racism in African American communities, where it has elicited “feelings of shame, hypervigilance, self-criticism, social anxiety, and in general, negative and uncomfortable feelings toward the self.”5 Scholars have drawn particular attention to its contradictory construction of blackness as a source of violence, anxiety, suspicion, sexual attraction, and fascination. George Yancy characterizes the white gaze as being “inextricably bound up with objectifying, exoticizing, and sexualizing the Black body, inscribing it with myths and codes that function to ontologize it, thus returning it as that which it is not.”6 Harris argues that it conceives of black bodies as “symbolic representation and fantasy” and constructs “stereotypical images and societal barriers” to deal with the resulting emotions of anxiety and desire.7 Today, it continues to reduce black men and women to a series of contradictory stereotypes: objects of both fear and fascination—alternately violent and lascivious, invisible yet impossible to ignore. Yancy characterizes these attitudes as all encompassing and destructive to positive black identity. He argues that successful efforts to transform perceptions of blacks must ultimately undermine the white gaze and challenge “whiteness as fanaticism.”8"

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"For Black people, so much of our day-to-day existence is navigating whiteness. “I cannot make this white person angry and I cannot scare them.”  Carris Adams

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"For Black people, so much of our day-to-day existence is navigating whiteness. “I cannot make this white person angry and I cannot scare them.”  Carris Adams

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For White Folks who Have Considered Terror, When Privilege was Enuf: The Thrills of the White Gaze

Carris Adams

Danny Giles

Jenn M. Jackson

Jared Richardson

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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is an adaptation of three lectures that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison delivered at the Massey Lectures at Harvard University in 1990. She turned the three-part series into a 91-page book, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The lectures concern issues of race in American literature and the ways that writers actively construct whiteness and blackness within literature.

Morrison examines the claim that works in the American literary canon were not affected by the presence of Africans and African Americans. She upsets this claim, finding evidence that American writers developed a mythology of blackness, which she calls “Africanism,” and that they used Africanism to define themselves.

Morrison locates her analysis in the shadows of American literature. The Africanist presence is not always in the spotlight but instead, she writes, reveals itself in a shadowy presence. A major occurrence in American literature is artists transferring their internal conflicts to a blank darkness. In America, a new country that sought to define itself in contrast to Europe, writers also sought to define themselves in contrast with darkness: They emphasized their freedom by contrasting it with the bondage of slaves. Often, the Africanist presence is used to define whites in literature such as in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Morrison discusses America establishing itself as new, white, and male. She states that the action of evading race within literature is itself an act of racism. The African presence informs American literature, often as a shadow even when the piece in question is not even about race issues or African characters. Slave narratives experienced a 19th-century publication boom while the question of freedom rages on in society. African race is a vehicle by which America knows that it isn’t enslaved—through the works of writers like Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Excerpt: "Writing Past The White Gaze As A Black Author" by L.J. Alonge

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Excerpt: "Writing Past The White Gaze As A Black Author" by L.J. Alonge

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"When I started writing stories four years ago, I knew, in a very vague but urgent way that I wanted to tell "my story," or at least the stories that were important to me: stories about the people I knew and loved, black and brown people, first-generation kids and our parents, poor people and working-class people and barely-middle class people trying to find meaning and connection and comfort.

So when I was presented with the chance to write Blacktop, a book series about a group of teenage misfits who find each other through basketball, I felt excited and ready. I'd written about basketball before, and I've played since I could walk. One of my earliest memories is of my six-foot father blocking my shot into a patch of wet grass.

The trouble started on the first page. I sat down, ready to catch all the great ideas coming down the creative flume, and instead I got a bunch of questions: Who was this story for, this story about a black kid playing basketball? And isn't this kind of cliché? Or maybe the assumption here is that black kids will only read if there's a ball involved? And so am I, by extension, by writing this series, encouraging the idea that black people are only interesting or important or valuable in relationship to our athletic skills?

I was searching for remedies to writer's block on YouTube when I found a video of Toni Morrison talking about the white gaze — the assumption that the reader is white and the resulting self-consciousness in your thinking and writing. Stories you know to be true and interesting somehow become distorted and unfamiliar. I'd try to write a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about "black criminality." I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fueling ideas about "black-on-black violence." But now this feeling had a name, which took away some of its menace, and suddenly writing seemed possible."

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When I started writing stories four years ago, I knew, in a very vague but urgent way that I wanted to tell "my story," or at least the stories that were important to me: stories about the people I knew and loved, black and brown people, first-generation kids and our parents, poor people and working-class people and barely-middle class people trying to find meaning and connection and comfort.

So when I was presented with the chance to write Blacktop, a book series about a group of teenage misfits who find each other through basketball, I felt excited and ready. I'd written about basketball before, and I've played since I could walk. One of my earliest memories is of my six-foot father blocking my shot into a patch of wet grass.

The trouble started on the first page. I sat down, ready to catch all the great ideas coming down the creative flume, and instead I got a bunch of questions: Who was this story for, this story about a black kid playing basketball? And isn't this kind of cliché? Or maybe the assumption here is that black kids will only read if there's a ball involved? And so am I, by extension, by writing this series, encouraging the idea that black people are only interesting or important or valuable in relationship to our athletic skills?

This kind of thinking isn't unique to me. Writers are natural parsers and over-thinkers. Plus I've known for a long time that as a black person, some white people expect a performance from me, something that might confirm what they think they know about my identity. That's why "You don't really sound black" actually means "I'm measuring everything you do and say against my very dim understanding of blackness." Take all of this as understood. What surprised me was that these questions took up so much imaginative space, and did it so quickly, and were in fact so large and puzzling that they stopped me from writing anything.

I was searching for remedies to writer's block on YouTube when I found a video of Toni Morrison talking about the white gaze - the assumption that the reader is white and the resulting self-consciousness in your thinking and writing. Stories you know to be true and interesting somehow become distorted and unfamiliar. I'd try to write a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about "black criminality." I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fueling ideas about "black-on-black violence." But now this feeling had a name, which took away some of its menace, and suddenly writing seemed possible.

Later on I read Playing in the Dark, Morrison's analysis of whiteness in American literature, in which she asks us to consider "What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free?"

It was the "in spite of" part of Morrison's question that rang most true to me. You're in this fictional universe where these black and brown kids are being kids, cutting up, looking for love, learning, failing, doing the hard work of becoming. In this universe there are also these white people standing in their living rooms, cousins and aunties of Baldwin's "little white man in all of us," quietly tsk-tsking at our heroes. Kids wandering the streets! Without parents! They check the locks on the windows. And then here I come, your bumbling narrator, trying to smooth things over and reassure these white folks that, actually, these kids are good and complex. You just don't know them. They're respectable.

Respectable. I wanted my characters to be respectable. I wanted them to somehow escape the judgement they'd get for just being, the same kind of judgement I've gotten for just being: stupid, angry, criminal.

This kind of thinking leads a writer to disaster. I was so conscious of that imagined tsk-tsking that I couldn't make these kids - who I knew in my heart, who I'd run into on a thousand basketball courts, who were perfect because they were good and flawed - I couldn't make them unkind or silly or petty or in any way complicated. Which is to say that I couldn't make them human. It wasn't until I figured out how to quiet those white voices that I was able to start writing again. What works for me is reminding myself that I'm just telling stories to the people who told me the first great stories I heard: my mother, my neighbors, my childhood friends. In my head they're sitting in these theatre-style seats and I'm standing in front of them, with one of those old-timey mics, trying to get them to feel something.

It's no secret that the stories we tell are important - they give shape to our experiences, they document our humanity, they cultivate our sense of possibility - but I realize now that I'd underestimated the mental work that "telling your story" actually takes, the kind of sustained effort needed to resist everything this country tells you about how marginalized or unimportant you are without the white gaze.

I've also found timeless models in the work of Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid and Zora Neal Hurston, whose work focuses on the experiences of black people, black women in particular, and isn't all that concerned with what non-black readers might think or say. They show me on every page what it means to be imaginatively free. It is, like every form of freedom, something I don't take for granted.

LJ Alonge is the author of Blacktop, a young adult fiction series. Follow him @Lanre_Ak.

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Writing Past The White Gaze As A Black Author

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast When I started writing stories four years ago, I knew, in a very vague but urgent way that I wanted to tell "my story," or at least the stories that were important to me: stories about the people I knew and loved, black and brown people, first-generation kids and our parents, poor people and working-class people and barely-middle class people trying to find meaning and connection and comfort.

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It is also evident in the way the characters see themselves.  Why does Pecola want blue eyes? (pg. 17- 18)

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It is also evident in the way the characters see themselves.  Why does Pecola want blue eyes? (pg. 17- 18)

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There are several moments that illustrate how White Gaze (or in other words, establishing what's White to be what's right) is a threat to the self-esteem of our characters. It says, "You are ugly people." But to whom and why?
"It was a truth supported by every billboard, every movie, every glance." (pg. 19).

The play starts with Pecola reading a book, describing a White family (pg. 9 and pg. 17).
Her mother Mrs. Breedlove is influenced by the beauty standards set by White movie stars (pg. 31). Once that standard is deemed impossible to reach, she resigns herself to ugly.

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The White Gaze can be seen by comparing and contrasting the treatment of Black people and White and White aligning characters.

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The White Gaze can be seen by comparing and contrasting the treatment of Black people and White and White aligning characters.

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Claudia, our narrator, expresses anger and frustration not necessarily with the behavior of White people, but the preferential treatment they recieve.
Shirley Temple and the baby doll (pg. 25-27)
Maureen Peel vs. Pecola (pg. 40)
Mrs. Breedlove and the Girl (pg. 59-62)