ABSTRACT

IN PLAYING IN THE DARK, Toni Morrison observes that historically, there is a pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim—of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes…. But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject (Morrison 1992, p. 11).