Toni Morrison's Only Short Story (Recitatif)

Recitatif is an incredibly complex story which raises all of the issues, well discussed, in this New Yorker article. One thing I was also struck by which is not here is, at least for me, the need to figure out the races of the two characters was caused by a need for moral ranking, not to determine an other (which luckily is separable). If to ‘see the someone in everyone’ is a political modality and political history is being valued (obviously) above individualism, the actions of these characters would become right or wrong. Recently, I was having a conversation with someone about what Rachel Dolezal really did wrong, if we were to ruminate on it. I came to that unlike gender, race is only a multiform platform through which power operates, whereas gender is a spectrum and spectrums have two ends even if those ends are infinite or undefinable. I was thinking about this story again in part because: if we did not know which character was what gender, it would not be a humanizing pursuit which turns the viewer inward at “their clues” because feminism does not posit that we are all the same except the cultural-ization which breeds differences but that intrinsically different people are deserving of the same rights and only we can assert who we are inside. When selfhood is less tied to definition the actions of the self are judge-able, morally, and moral judgment is inseparable from understanding even if the way we dispense judgement is mutable and incredibly worthy of interrogation.