Toni Morrison Taught Black Women, ‘You Are Your Best Thing’
The way she centered our narratives was both radical and unapologetic
Just like her beloved works, the impact of Ms.* Toni Morrison as an author and thought leader will continue to transcend time and space. Many describe her works as a reflection of “the African American experience” however, this epithet ignores the ways Ms. Morrison radically centered the narratives of Black-American women.
Ms. Morrison’s concept of rememory invites Black women to heal by reclaiming our stories, reclaiming historically White and male spaces, and most importantly reclaiming our sense of self.
Even though I had the privilege of being introduced to Ms. Morrison’s work and the concept of feminism when I attended an all-girls, and nearly all-White, preparatory high school in Westchester County, New York, I didn’t begin to grasp the intersection between the two until my senior year of college. I took a seminar in the classics department about murdering mothers, inspired by Euripides’ Medea, where the eponymous demigod protagonist notoriously murdered her own children. Most of the texts we reviewed in the course were written by White men who…
