Morrison presents this powerful look at how literature has helped and hindered our understanding of what it means to be and be seen as "white" or "not white" in America.

The book is pocket size and only a bit more than 100 pages, so we don't read everything discussed in her six lectures. Still, much is covered and I'm left with the feeling that nothing important is left out. She explains why and how she has written her important novels, gives examples from her life, discusses history and politics.

It's about slavery, immigration, globalization, the psychology and social meanings of blackness, foreignness, forced and voluntary movement from place to place in the past and especially now. A book every American should read. ( )

These six lectures take the reader through coded language designed by the powers that be to differentiate between who belongs in the group and who does not. Morrison pulls from different stages of American history, from antebellum history to the most active periods of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century to Jim Crow to our more recent history.

This exploration challenges a whitewashed view of not only history but a culture which is defined in the States more by color than by any real defining characteristics of culture such as the characteristics of a people – intellectual achievement, religion, food, customs and social patterns. In this limited definition becoming American means becoming white – an assimilation that the European immigrants of a century ago could achieve but persons of color, could not.

Perhaps what is most powerful is Morrison's discussion of the ways in which a nation's obsession with color has outweighed any insight into the culture or the characteristics of people. Immigrants, after so long, where not identified as Irish, as Italian, as Polish, or Russian, etc. after they became able to identify as white.

And Morrison illustrates this obsession through the nation's literature, the indoctrination of a racial power structure through the words of Flannery O'Connor, an illustration of stereotypes assigned by color in the memoirs of Mary Prince. The discussion illustrates that the stereotypes used to demean black Americans, words like 'savage' or 'animalistic' became embodied by the white slave-owners rather than the slaves. Yet the codified language became ingrained in white culture.

And more powerful is the discussion of a kind of moral relativity that places other considerations of right and wrong as secondary to color. The acceptance in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom of incest when compared to the one drop rule, or in Morrison's own Beloved of killing one's children (to escape the pain of slavery) if it weakens the power of the Fugitive Slave Act, are vivid examples of the way in which color, either consciously or subconsciously, and the desire to maintain a color-based power structure have made other considerations of right and wrong secondary.

An important read. And a much-needed discussion for anyone that thought society had ever evolved to the point the problems of racism were in the past. And a much-needed starting point for self-examination for anyone who considers their self a human.
( )

One of our greatest living writers talks bluntly about the themes she has worked on her entire life: how we divide humanity into Us and Them, whether racism, fear of foreigners, women, the Other.

I thought that at just over a hundred pages this would be a fairly quick read. But no. It's very densely written, digging thoughtfully into important subjects. Every sentence needs to be turned over and over in the mind to extract some juice. I'm going to have to read it again, I think. ( )

This is a ridiculously short book. Thankfully, Toni Morrison's words are worth ten of most others.

Of the six (short) essays, four are excellent, with Being or Becoming the Stranger head and shoulders above the rest – although Narrating the Other is a close second, if you've read Beloved.

Being a white European, Morrison's deep insight as an African-American is always a raw, shuddering education. Where we meet is in the whole business of Othering, which she elucidates from a perspective I can't have, yet wholly share.

Years ago, this book would have enraged me; now, it's a clear explanation for what's going on around all of us every day. ( )

What a brilliant woman! What a shame that she even has to write about "Otherness". Absolute pleasure to read about her decisions about writing her novels and the avenues that she took with them. ( )