Tar Baby Themes

If you opened Tar Baby randomly and pointed to a sentence, chances are that it would be a sentence about racial conflict. Jade and Son argue about the best way to live as a black person in the mode...

In Tar Baby, Toni Morrison calls into question a lot of things we might take for granted. One of these things is the cohensiveness of the family unit. For many of us, it's natural for parents and c...

Ambition pops up in Tar Baby as not so much as a theme as a debate, especially between Jade and Son. Jade always argues that Son is a fool for saying he doesn't want any money or fameand claims tha...

Jade she spends a lot of Tar Baby stressing about whether or not she's an authentic person. Unlike many of the black people in her life, she was educated at an elite French university thanks to the...

What kind of rich old man decides to become a recluse in the Caribbean? A control freak. Valerian Street's control-freakiness comes out in force when he tries to interact with the natural world. Si...

Among many others things, Tar Baby is a novel about how the past always lives on in people's memories and forms a crucial part of their identities as individuals. And we're not just talking about p...

Over the past 400 years, white people have denigrated black people as being somehow more primitive or less advanced. This belief is reflected in the racial slurs that compare black people to animal...

With all of the emphasis that Tar Baby puts on race, it can be easy to overlook just how significant gender is as a recurring theme. When Jade worries about her status as a black woman, for example...