“Racially Inflicted Language” and the Archives

In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison highlights the ways that language obfuscates yet also illuminates he Africanist presence at the heart of American literature. Morrison delivered the lectures that would constitute Playing in the Dark in 1990, and she foresaw possible backlash from her ideas. She chose to risk backlash because the point she sought to make was vitally important. As she puts it, “for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, and definitive.” While Morrison focuses on writers, we can extend her observation because the language we use everyday constitutes “racially inflected language.”

Thomas Gray’s preface to The Confessions of Nat Turner is but merely one example of the impacts of such language. Gray describes Turner as “a gloomy fanatic” who lived within “the recesses of his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind” where he crafted “schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites.” Later, Gray even questions why Turner and close to 200 other enslaved individuals killed white men, women, and children. Gray and others view Turner as “bewildered and confounded.” They don’t consider that his enslavement, and the enslavement of others, had anything to do with the…