It would seem that to continue to see race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignoranc… - Toni Morrison

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It would seem that to continue to see race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained. Which may explain in part why in 1975 we are left with pretty much the same mental equipment we had in 1775 — the equipment that hadn’t the curiosity to record the names of human beings in a ship’s manifest, hasn’t the curiosity to examine the medieval minds of scientific racists, theologic [sic] racists, historical racists, literary racists; an intelligence that is so crippled that it could in all seriousness ask W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1905, in pursuit of some study as a White professor from Clark University did, whether colored people shed tears.

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About Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

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Also Known As

Birth Name: Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Alternative Names: Chloe Anthony Wofford Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
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Additional quotes by Toni Morrison

Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean.

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I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: "Once upon a time."

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