What do black women feel about Women's Lib? Distrust. It is white, therefore suspect.
Published in 1971 when “women’s lib” was a term tossed around casually every day, Morrison takes up the issue from the perspective of racial disenfranchisement. One successful black female author quotes another on the subject when she references an interview with Nikki Giovanni in which the writer distills the essence of exactly why there might be a resistance among women of color to what is seemingly an effort to empower women: “The Women's Liberation Movement is basically a family quarrel between white women and white men.” Morrison expands upon this centralized concept to broaden the argument to embrace into her analysis Flip Wilson’s then-wildly popular drag character, Geraldine, interracial marriage and black female envy of their white counterparts.
Hemingway…has no need, desire or awareness of [African-Americans] either as readers of his work, or as people existing anywhere other than in his imaginative (an imaginatively lived) world.
Well, it needed to be said and it needed to be said more often. The essay in its totality is a complex analysis of the role of African-Americans in the fiction of white writers who have long been a fixture in the academic canon of American literature. The essay is particularly multifaceted on the subject of Hemingway’s utilization of black characters—especially black women—in his macho stories of manhood defined. What is most notable is her ultimately contention that the role of the black woman in these otherwise utterly predictable fables is surprising to the point of blowing up the whole Hemingway myth: it is the women who are the predators and all those man’s men who take on the role of nurturer. The point, of course, is that even when white authors have absolutely no conscious intention of working out the role of blacks in American life, it inevitably works its way into the final result.
We have been deceived. We thought he loved us. Now we know that everything we saw was false.
Even though they are literally the opening words to this essay, the white reader is almost universally bound to detect the irony. Nothing gives it away; certainly not anything that Morrison adds into the mix. They are simple words; only two of them possess more than a single syllable. They are immediately recognizable and place in accessibly decorative order. But since the essay opens a book about the O.J. Simpson trial, it is quite easy for the white reader—or, really, any reader absolutely convinced of Simpson’s guilt—to detect the note of irony. The divergence between what one reads as ironic and what another reads of total sincerity is the entire point of the essay, naturally. Suspicions of irony play out as the narrative unfolds and the narration indicates beyond much ambiguity that the writer is not one of those convinced of Simpson’s guilt.
“That is where Mr. Bush made the final offer and Judge Thomas accepted.”
In her opening introductory essay to a book of pieces from various authors weighing in on the Clarence Thomas hearings and Anita Hill scandal, Morrison finds that one tiny razor’s edge of shared experience of both participants. Each was reduced to a racial stereotype to sell the story and make it worthy of newspaper headlines and the top story on broadcast news. Throughout, Morrison points to coded phrases and words that by themselves often exist outside the lines of racial stereotyping, but when connected on a linear plane take on great significance. She quotes Dowd’s article which appeared in the New York Times as an example of a racist trope which she admits was surely not even regarded as such by President Bush. The “that” in question is the President’s own bedroom in the White House with the implication being that proposing to put another black man on the Supreme Court was the kind of discussion which had to be held in secret for any number of reasons, none of which can possibly be termed positive.
