Loving Mean: Racialized Medicine and the Rise of Postwar Eugenics in Toni Morrison’s Home

Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) takes up issues of (anti-)Blackness, eugenics, and the healing powers of communities of Black women. In the novel, Cee, the protagonist’s sister, is hired as a “helper” (explicitly not a “nurse”) for a white eugenicist. Cee is essentially incarcerated at the doctor’s home office, where she is reduced to a sort of living cadaver upon whom the doctor experiments, leaving her unable to bear children. Upon being rescued from the doctor, Cee is nurtured back to health by a community of lay Black women in the South. Morrison’s novel critiques a history of anti-Black racism in the medical field that has situated Black persons (especially Black women) as particularly susceptible to abuse, malpractice, and incomplete or nonexistent care. I situate my discussion of Home alongside an exploration of forced sterilizations of incarcerated Black and Latinx women in US corrections facilities to illustrate Morrison’s illumination of historical and ongoing racial injustices in the entangled US medical, legal, and military systems. This essay explores the modes by which communities of Black women practice an ethics of care for one another and collectively resist anti-Black biopolitical systems. In taking on the role of healers, the Black women in this novel deny white attempts at control over Black persons’ bodies, lives, and reproduction. Morrison’s novel instead presents a move toward Black liberation, care, and safety that sets the stage for thinking about contemporary health and legal issues—namel,y anti-Black racism and the disproportionality of negative outcomes for Black persons in US medical systems.

“Nothing Made Them Change Their Minds about the Medical Industry”: Medical Abuse, Incarceration, and Healing in Toni Morrison’sHome

Allen

2021

When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Cutter

2021

Toni Morrison spent much of her career detailing the unpredictability of African American existence within a racist society, with a special focus on patriarchal violence and medical apartheid against women’s bodies. Yet Morrison also limns out alternative modes of healing within a Black metacultural framework that moves between Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt. As we move forward from the COVID-19 crisis, research has suggested that training more African American doctors, nurses, and physician assistants might curtail medical racism. Morrison’s fiction looks to a more basic level in which love of the bodies of African American people is at the center of healing. This article therefore discusses medical racism and applies Morrison’s lessons to the COVID-19 moment that her writing trenchantly foreshadows. It focuses on three healers who elide the medical establishment to embody a metacultural ethics of healing: Baby Suggs (in Beloved [1987]), Consolata Sosa (in Paradise [1997]), and Ethel Fordham (in Home [2012]). Morrison fuses an African-diasporic framework with embodied new knowledge that allows individuals to gain insight and agency in a white-dominant medical world that still refuses to endorse the idea that Black people’s bodies and psyches really do matter. An examination of these healers’ practices therefore sheds light on the COVID-19 moment by suggesting ways that African American people can stay “woke” and have agency when encountering and navigating traditional health care systems, which even today view the bodies of African Americans as fodder for medical experiments, immune to disease, and not in need of ethical and humane medical care.

“Say, Who Owns This House?”: US Violence, Indebtedness, and Care in Toni Morrison’s Home

Pak

2022

The simultaneous exclusion from and the complicated desire for inclusion within the narrative of “America” haunts Home (2012), Toni Morrison’s tenth novel. Taking place primarily in 1954, the novel follows two seemingly disparate story lines, the first being that of Frank Money, a Black veteran of the Korean War, the second focusing on his younger sister Cee, who is subject to the eugenics project headed by her employer. As these storylines intersect, by virtue of these two characters being siblings, Morrison addresses the ties between military and reproductive violence and their ongoing legacies in the United States. I argue that military and reproductive violence are part and parcel of Frank and Cee’s possibilities of being hailed as Americans, to feel at “home.” Yet Frank’s interpellation is only possible when he participates in the murderous imperialism that drives US intervention in Asia, and Cee’s body is made fungible in the name of racist scientific “progress.” To be American is to buttress white supremacist ideologies around American empire and exceptionalism, and to be violent. Morrison demonstrates how exclusion from this narrative is fundamentally, necessarily, a Black feminist framework. I also address debt and indebtedness and how we imagine what is owed to whom. Finally, I draw on Christina Sharpe’s theorizing on “wake work” to demonstrate Morrison’s argument that spaces of home divorced from violence are only made possible through a Black feminist practice of care.