The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett

Author:Juda Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780299324988
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Other people call it humor. It’s not sort of laughing away one’s troubles. . . . Laughter itself for Black people has nothing to do with what’s funny at all.

In these pages, I am interested in exploring how whiteness itself, the exposure of its unique foibles, may invite laughter from some, if not all, of us.

In a Google list of jokes about white people, one joke offers a dead-serious (humorous?) explanation for why black comedians don’t tell jokes about white men: in order to keep their jobs. But the world of comedy has been forever changed by Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, and Trevor Noah. Some have pointed to Eddie Murphy’s 1984 skit “White Like Me,” where he reverses more than one hundred years of race humor by adopting white face and lampooning the privileges of whiteness, as a key moment in the evolution of comedy.

In black communities, white privilege has always, of course, been the subject of humor, invective, and caricature, but a broader cultural awareness needed Murphy and others to make whiteness even visible. Although Murphy’s “White Like Me” airs in the same decade that Morrison is writing Beloved, the expectations of fiction readers at the time were no doubt quite different from the expectations of Saturday Night Live viewers. Both, I would argue, move the broader cultural awareness of whiteness further into our consciousness.

The 1980s also saw the first airing of The Cosby Show, the rise of independent black media such as BET (Black Entertainment Television), and the enormous popularity of The Oprah Winfrey Show. It is also the decade Morrison may have first conceived her influential study on whiteness, Playing in the Dark, which followed quickly on the heels of Beloved.

Although Morrison’s study of whiteness (along with most if not all studies of whiteness) does not closely investigate humor as a tool for uncovering, exposing, or contributing to our understanding of whiteness, Beloved—which has no shortage of white cruelties—offers not only Amy Denver as a contrasting image but, at the end of the novel, Mr. Bodwin. In a scene that is no less fraught with seriousness than Sethe dying in the woods, Sethe’s near murder of Mr. Bodwin is a masterful uncovering of the way white privilege threatens to unseat itself.

The scene appears in a climactic moment where everything and everyone converges on 124 Bluestone. Thirty women of the community come to exorcise the evil ghost that has taken over Sethe’s house. Mr. Bodwin, the owner of the home and the white man who has allowed Sethe to live there, is arriving to transport Denver to his home, where she will work for him. Beloved and Sethe hear the women singing and come out onto the porch, at which point the entire scene becomes infused in a bit of chaos and a lot of magic.

The singing women create a “wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees,” and they see the “devil-child” as assuming the shape of a pregnant woman.

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