The Origin of Others

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Foreword-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword Summary

In the Foreword, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, briefly introduces Toni Morrison’s examination of American racism and Othering. He acknowledges the political climate out of which Morrison’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures emerged before noting that the book is “an inquiry on the field of American history and thus addresses itself to the oldest and most potent form of identity politics in American history—the identity politics of racism” (x). He mentions Racecraft by Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, which argues that Americans have erased racism by referring to race as if it were “somehow a feature of the natural world and racism the predictable result of it” (xi). Coates remarks that in contrast to this view of race as something beyond people’s control, Morrison confronts the concept as a fragile construct that has such a stranglehold because it flows from the need to confirm one’s humanity by denying it to others.

He goes on to mention the work that Morrison examines in the first couple of chapters, such as that of Thomas Thistlewood and Mary Prince, before talking about contemporary acts of police brutality. He says, “In America, part of the idea of race is that whiteness automatically confers a decreased chance of dying like Michael Brown, or Walter Scott, or Eric Garner” (xv). This leads to his point that the rise of Donald Trump, driven by “economic anxiety” (xv), is an example of the increased concern for white death—a concern absent when Black people are dying en masse. He concludes by saying that racism matters in America and that humans rarely concede the privileges that accompany belonging when that sense of belonging depends upon the invention of an Other. As such, Morrison’s Origins is necessary because it grapples with how racism came to be and why it still has a grip on American society. In that regard, it offers some understanding that might aid us into the future.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Romancing Slavery”

In Chapter 1, Toni Morrison reflects on her experience of meeting her great-grandmother as a way to introduce the main premise of Othering: that humans have a social and psychological need to belong. This need prompts people to define the “Other,” or the “Stranger,” to define themselves. This need is most evident in the construction of race, which has characterized (white) Americans’ sense of self and belonging.

Morrison examines scientific literature—namely, Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” (4-5)—to demonstrate how scientific racism has constructed and controlled the Other in order to define the white self and maintain its difference from and domination over the Other. A discussion of Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries, particularly his casual documentation of raping enslaved women, also reveals the absence of moral judgment and accountability on the part of slave owners. This suggests an acceptance of the status quo, i.e., slavery.

Morrison then makes the point that the romanticization of slavery has helped white America accommodate the degradation of slavery while maintaining a sense of difference between itself and the Other. This romanticization renders slavery acceptable, preferable, and humanizing (9-10). She uses Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the primary example. Morrison’s literary analysis of Stowe’s novel demonstrates that its “carefully demarcated passages intended to quiet the fearful white reader” (13).

Morrison mentions that her own work, like The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child, are inquiries into the harm and destruction of racial self-loathing. She goes on to list several questions regarding race, Othering, and belonging that she explores in her previous literary works as well as in The Origin of Others. She concludes the chapter with a quote from Jolie A. Sheffer’s The Romance of Race to demonstrate that whiteness has defined American belonging (16-17).

Chapter 2 Summary: “Being or Becoming the Stranger”

In Chapter 2, Morrison explores the process of Othering through examination of two significant dimensions of the process: one, identifying the benefits of creating and sustaining an Other; and two, discovering the social and political consequences of repudiating those benefits (20). Through an analysis of literature by white writers, narratives from enslaved people, and memoir, Morrison demonstrates the relational aspect inherent to the process of Othering.

She begins with a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial N*****.” O’Connor’s short story illustrates “the illusion of power and respectability through the process of inventing an Other” (24). This process must be understood alongside other and earlier categories of identification and exclusion that have been used to assert ascendance and power, including culture, physical traits, and religion (24). Bruce Baum’s The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race provides an example of shifting notions of identification and exclusion, which leads Baum to conclude that race is an effect of power and prompts Morrison to consider what the relationship to the Other means in this ascendance to power.

Due to this relational aspect, Morrison says that slave narratives are “critical to understanding the process of Othering” (25). Thus, she examines two slave narratives, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave by Mary Prince and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Both narratives illustrate the process of Othering by turning an eye towards the degradation of slave owners as a result of their sadistic treatment of enslaved people. The process of Othering involves consequences for repudiating the benefits of Othering: Sympathizing with the Other leads to losing racial rank and one’s own value and difference (30), thereby producing the desperate need to confirm one’s own difference through harsh treatment of the Other.

Morrison then turns to a personal reflection and brief discussion of the roles that language, image, and experience play in reinforcing a sense of difference. She suggests that we distance ourselves from the Other through forcing our own images onto the Other, “as well as becoming the stranger we may abhor” (31). Where language, image, and experience are concerned, it is “routine media representations [that] deploy images and language that narrow our view of what humans look like (or ought to look like) and what in fact we are like” (37), thereby coloring our experiences when we are in relationship with one another.

She concludes the chapter by suggesting that the Other is, in fact, a reflection of ourselves that alarms us because of the profound emotions this reflection conjures. Thus, we attempt to “own, govern, and administrate the Other” by denying them personhood (39). Wasn't totally sure how to handle this when it's a text within a text (and a title).

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Color Fetish”

In Chapter 3, Morrison examines the way that white writers have used skin color to reveal character and drive narrative. She juxtaposes this skin color strategy in their work to her own work, where she has deliberately chosen to reveal the race and racialized experiences of her characters in non-colorist ways.

To demonstrate the role of colorism in driving narrative and character portrayal in (white) American literature, Morrison discusses the work of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, interracial relations are a driving plot point. Morrison notes that while incest is also a part of this story, it is the idea of “race mixing” that drives the plot and leads to murder. She also discusses Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden. Hemingway’s use of colorism spans from the depiction of “despicable blacks, to sad but sympathetic ones, to extreme black-fueled eroticism” (43).

Morrison notes that the use of colorist tropes in fictional literature is an outgrowth of the American legal code. For example, legislative acts of Virginia include the 1705 exclusion of those deemed Others from being trial witnesses and the 1847 criminal code prohibiting white people from instructing Black people, free or enslaved, to read or write. In addition, the General Code of the City of Birmingham of 1944 prohibited white and Black people from playing games together in public spaces.

Noting the cultural mechanics of Americanness—i.e., becoming white and thereby receiving the advantages of whiteness—Morrison explains that people of African descent have not had the choice to become white. As such, she has been interested in the portrayal of Black characters through culture rather than skin color. She discusses several of her novels (Paradise, The Bluest Eye, God Help the Child, and A Mercy), in which the “technique of racial erasure” is a strategy she has used to “defang cheap racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself” and write literature about Black people which reveals race in non-colorist ways (52, 53).

Foreword-Chapter 3 Analysis

In Chapters 1-3, Morrison emphasizes the impact that the process of Othering has on those who enjoy the privileges of “belonging” in a racialized society—i.e., those who can identify as white. While the social and political benefits of being/becoming white are apparent, the process of Othering ultimately degrades the integrity of white people. Morrison illustrates this degradation in her analysis of the literature in the first three chapters. This degradation includes the cognitive dissonance of those who create and maintain the borders of whiteness, the brutality that must be employed in order to maintain these borders, and the homogenizing effect that racism has on those who can enjoy the privileges of belonging within the borders.

In the first chapter, Morrison writes, “Race has been a constant arbiter of difference, as have wealth, class, and gender—each of which is about power and the necessity of control” (3). While she does mention the intersecting categories of wealth, class, and gender (in addition to a longer human history of belonging and exclusion that preceded racism), it is the race factor with which she is most concerned in The Origin of Others. Her concern with racism and race arguably indicates the extent to which it circumscribes other social categories in American society. Its all-consuming nature, then, necessitates that there be a concerted effort on the part of white people to maintain white supremacy; race is at heart a fragile and fluid construct, but multiple hierarchies depend on it for their perpetuation. This maintenance is necessarily characterized by cognitive dissonance.

When Morrison posits in Chapter 1, “One of the ways nations would accommodate slavery’s degradation was by brute force; another was to romance it” (6), she acknowledges the two main strategies used to account for the inconsistency that characterizes the maintenance of whiteness. The latter strategy is most evident in her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While Stowe’s work has been revered for galvanizing the abolitionist movement, Morrison’s analysis exposes its romanticization of slavery—that is, its denial of the realities of human bondage by suggesting that “control, benign or rapacious, may ultimately not be necessary” because “Negroes only want to serve” (9-10).

Morrison emphasizes the passage of Stowe’s novel in which enslaved children are happy to eat their food from a dirt floor as exemplifying the type of narrative construction that would help white people to feel better about their complicity. As Morrison notes, Stowe’s contemporary readership was white and needed an image of slavery that did not make them out to be bad people for allowing and benefitting from the privileges of whiteness. Romancing slavery allows white people to continue enjoying the benefits conferred by the Othering of Black people while also absolving themselves of its violence.

However, the brute force involved in identifying and controlling the Other was indeed a reality of slavery, and its enactment is another indication of the cognitive dissonance that characterizes the maintenance of white supremacy. To illustrate this point, Morrison points to slave narratives and what they reveal about the process of Othering. Her analysis of The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides a glaring example of the inconsistency between belief and action. Slaveholders—those who believe themselves to be different from and superior to the brute, savage Other—are the very ones enacting undue violence on enslaved people. Regarding this violence, Morrison says, “How hard they work to define the slave as inhuman, savage, when in fact, the definition of the inhuman describes overwhelmingly the punisher” (29). She then expresses that the urgency of distinguishing between oneself and the Other is so great that the process of Othering overwhelmingly illuminates the degradation of the slave owner (30).

With Morrison’s analyses of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The History of Mary Prince, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, readers see how hard white people must work to maintain the idea and borders of their whiteness, primarily because of the fluidity and fragility of race. Closing out Chapter 1, Morrison includes a passage from Jolie A. Sheffer’s The Romance of Race. This passage notes that the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the United States between 1890 and 1920 might have challenged the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, but it did not challenge white hegemony in the United States (16). Instead, those immigrants became white Americans by downplaying their European heritage, which was marked by cultural and ethnic difference (17).

Morrison again notes the phenomenon of European immigrants becoming white Americans in Chapter 3 with the hypothetical Italian or Russian immigrant coming to the United States. If that immigrant “wishes to be American—to be known as such and to belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white” (49). Sheffer’s quote in Chapter 1 and Morrison’s hypothetical in Chapter 3 show that the borders of whiteness are not only movable and therefore fragile, but also that belonging requires repudiating other identities (or anything else that might suggest difference from the white group as it is defined in America).

In effect, the homogenizing and degrading effects of racism separate white people from themselves. It denies them integrity, so in order to have some sense of self, there must be an Other against which they can define themselves. As Morrison demonstrates, literature has been a prime vehicle for conveying ideas about racial identity and the process of Othering that it entails. She attends to Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial N*****” in Chapter 2 to illustrate how the process of identifying the Other creates the illusion of power and respectability for the white characters in the short story (20-24).

Racism is also integral to American literature in that racial tropes have been used to drive plot and reveal character (42). Morrison’s discussion of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway’s racist narrative tactics once again illustrates that identifying and controlling the Other is degrading to white people. Morrison all but implies that Faulkner and Hemingway’s works are uncreative and unoriginal because of their reliance on racial tropes. Regarding their work, she poses rhetorical questions:

How much tension or interest would Ernest Hemingway have lost if he had simply used Wesley’s given name? How much fascination and shock would be dampened if Faulkner had limited the book’s central concern to incest rather than the theatrical ‘one-drop’ curse? (51-52).

In contrast, Morrison has found opportunities for careful, creative, and liberatory narrative-building by “refusing to rest on racial signs” (49). Her questions and points, like all of her analysis in Chapters 1 through 3, prompt readers to consider that while Othering is indeed harmful to those who are Othered, the degradation to the ones who create, maintain, and enjoy the social and political privileges of Othering is also quite severe. This is nowhere more evident than in the impact that racism and the invention of race have had on those who identify as white, such as the casual documentation of rape (7-9); the “scientific” creation of a “mental illness” to describe a traumatized person’s attempt to escape a traumatic situation (4); the embrace of sadistic tendencies to differentiate oneself from the Other; and even the renunciation of one’s own heritage in order to belong. In the first three chapters, Morrison demonstrates that the process of Othering, particularly its racist manifestation, is perhaps one of the most degrading faces of humans’ social and psychological need to belong.