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Quote :Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence—which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture—has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature. […] There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. […] The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.
An unspoken assumption among literary critics is that literature written by white American authors has nothing to do with black people—which is kind of weird, given that Africans and African Americans have been in the U.S. for 400 years.
Morrison argues that everything in American history and society has been shaped, on some level, by the presence of African Americans. So actually, works of literature written by white authors are always shaped by the presence of African Americans, even when these works don't explicitly deal with African Americans, because the author's own experience has been shaped by the presence of African Americans.
Morrison points out that an Ethnic Studies literary perspective isn't just relevant to "ethnic" literature. If you're a literary critic interested in Ethnic Studies, you shouldn't just confine yourself to studying African American literature or Native American literature, for example. Literature written by white authors is also, on some level, always about ethnicity and race. White authors are "ethnic" too, after all, and on top of that, white American authors can't help but respond to the U.S.'s very complicated ethnic and racial identity.