TTBOOK GEMS

Toni Morrison (GEMS - from program #03-12-07A - PRIZE- WINNING WRITERS)

From an interview Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison did with Steve Paulson on the Public Radio International program "To the Best of Our Knowledge." Her new novel "Love" explores class tensions among African-Americans. She says the Civil Rights movement actually created class differences.

"I didn't have any racial awe."

Toni Morrison: Now, you don't have to live in those (segregated) neighborhoods anymore. You don't have to go to those black-owned businesses. You don't have to go to black lawyers or black doctors. You don't have to go to those powerful, excellent black schools. You can go anywhere. In an apartheid situation, many of those institutions that were dependent on a black clientele failed. And it was interesting to me that one of the cries of the Civil Rights movement was black nationalism, which meant a kind of separatism. "Support our own businesses, our own neighborhoods," etc. Which was precisely the situation prior to civil rights. All I'm saying is, the progress of acquiring full citizenship has a cost.

Steve Paulson: I'm curious about your background and the role that it plays in your work. You grew up in Lorain, Ohio. How much did that place shape your writing?

Toni Morrison: Oh, a lot, I'm sure. It was a small town, a working class town. One library, one high school. A very mixed town. I never really knew - still don't - what it means to live in an all-black neighborhood. We were just all poor. I never went to the black schools. I never participated in that particular kind of experience that seems to be, at least in the public mind, typical of African-American existence. It wasn't for me. The incidents of racism were irrelevant to me as a kid and a teenager. I just thought, this has nothing to do with me.

Steve Paulson: Did you have different kinds of relationships growing up in that particular environment - I mean, relatively integrated but poor.

Toni Morrison: Yeah, I think so. For instance, I was stunned to see the whole press toward busing. It had some logic, but it seemed to me a little ridiculous, switching schools. You know, I've been sitting in schools with white kids all my life. Some were brilliant, some were thugs. Nothing academic improved because of that. But what you get if you grow up with other races - Mexicans were there, and East Europeans were there, and tons of Italians - all those people were there, and you lived with them in that town, on that street. They were right next door. So I didn't have any awe, racial awe.

Then later on, when you're an adult, you find out there's something else going on. So that moving to Washington and seeing signs in the buses that said "Colored Only" - for me - now I don't want to make this too glib - but it was kind of a hoot. I would steal those signs. We would take them home and put them on the bookcase. Now mind you, for my parents, there was nothing funny about it at all because they were born in the turn-of-the-century South - Alabama and Georgia. And their whole lives were trying to protect themselves from evil or marauding or violent white people. Their lives were different.

Toni Morrison (GEMS - from program #03-12-07A - PRIZE- WINNING WRITERS)

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