Toni Morrison Repsonse

            The concept of having a work written about a targeted group of people, whether that be a certain race or gender, and still being universal is an interesting idea posed by the quote from Toni Morrison. I think the point Morrison is trying to illustrate is that when a work is centered around an often misrepresented grouping of people, in her case black people, is has a tendency to focus on explaining and justifying certain aspects of their life. In order for a wider audience to be able to relate, black authors feel responsible to cater to the knowledge and viewpoint of a non-black audience. However, Morrison believes that allowing her sincere perspective as a black woman to guide her writing, without wasting pages gentrifying her characters to make them appeal to every audience, she allows her characters to act naturally and the plot to develop around them. Through raw, honest portrayals of black life, she tells her story unapologetically. This draws in a diverse audience as instead of using sentences to explain what it means to be black, she highlights black life through action. A white reader could enjoy a novel written by Toni Morrison almost blindly, having race playing an intrinsic role as it is woven into the central being of each character rather than inserted in awkward explanations. The reader could sometimes forget the race of the characters, as it comes as a natural second nature to their existence.