Response to Toni Morrison on The Configurations of Blackness

In the chapter "Configurations of Blackness" , Toni Morrison shows us that the act of 'othering' really has no limits, and that at times we are all guilty of separating ourselves from those we consider to be strangers. This journal discusses Morrison's story of the residents of Ruby, Oklahoma (in her novel Paradise); these residents, who were primarily blacks escaping slavery and segregation, became perpetrators of othering in their attempt to escape being victims of it.

Prompt: Identify clearly and specifically three reasons why or ways in which the residents of Ruby, Oklahoma, in the novel Paradise, create their own dystopia rather than the desired utopia. Clarify what is meant by utopia and dystopia.

At some point in our lives, we have all wondered what a life without any troubles or social ills would look like. ‘What if there were no racists?’ ‘What if poverty was unheard of?’ When we engage in this enticing but wishful thinking, we are actually imagining a utopia: an imagined or hypothetical place, system or state of existence in which everything is perfect, especially in respect of social structures, laws and politics. To see the opposite of this, we can look to Toni Morrison’s Paradise. In it, she describes the fictional town Ruby, Oklahoma, whose founders envisioned a utopia during the town’s building phase, but instead, created the polar opposite: a dystopia; a place where everything is as bad as possible.

Based on Morrison’s narrative, towns like Ruby were founded by blacks in order to create separate communities where they could thrive, detach themselves from the white ideas of their inferiority, and escape the physical manifestations of this perceived inferiority, such as lynching. In their minds, this separation would bring prosperity, success and good living overall. However, the founders of Ruby embraced exclusionary principles which meant that the town simply could not achieve utopian ideals.

Firstly, it operated under the motto ‘come prepared or not at all’. This meant that those without skills and assets of their own (mostly women, children and elderly people) were turned away.

In addition, ‘pure’ blackness was the ideal in these towns, and anybody with even a drop of ‘other’ blood ranked much lower on the social hierarchy. Inter-racial relations with those who were outsiders to this configuration of blackness were looked down upon, and this often resulted in conflict amongst townspeople.

This racial divide was also accompanied by a religious divide. Religious leaders preached contrasting views of God and his word, which further polarized the community.

It is clear, then, that many of Ruby’s inhabitants were recreating different versions of the very situations they escaped. They turned the tables so that now, they were the perpetrators and not the victims of discrimination; they were the ones who defined what was considered normal. The resulting conflict caused the town to resemble a dystopia.