8. Basking in Morrison's Shade with Saeed Jones

In the words of drag performer Dorian Corey, shade requires you to "go to the fine point." To throw shade—to insult your subject, either a text or a person, with maximum flare and make it fun for an audience—you have to pick out extremely precise details, naming the specificities of what you dislike.  Toni Morrison was an exceptionally close reader, and this enabled her to be a master of shade.  At a celebratory event at the end of her tour for ON MORRISON, Namwali Serpell discusses Morrison's shade as critical praxis with poet, memoirist, and host of "Vibe Check" Saeed Jones. They read and open up Morrison's excoriating review of Regina Nadelson's Who Is Angela Davis?, an unauthorized biography of the young revolutionary. The review was originally published in 1972 in The New York Times. Here is the passage Saeed reads of Toni Morrison's review: "On the other hand, who is Regina Nadelson and why is she behaving like Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way? How Liza could get to the point of actually crossing the ice or how Angela Davis got to the point of actually joining the Communist party was quite naturally that white intelligence informed them both; and since Harriet was prey to the scientific racism of her day she attributed Liza's feistiness to the genetic transference of information via white blood; but Regina lives in the 20th century and is an enlightened racist who knows about cultural determinism, which is to say Angela got her courage not from white blood but white culture and that her sublime militancy was spawned by white teachers, white boyfriends, white psychoanalysts, and a special brand of white terror perpetrated on some respectable colored folks for how else could she dally with Black Panthers and fight Ronald Reagan and carry the Card, for surely no black folks influenced her (except abstract victims and her middle class—read white-oriented—family) which is why Miss Regina who knew Angela at Elisabeth Irwin High School didn't take the trouble to interview any blacks as she went about collecting her data and rejecting all eyeball to eyeball or flesh to flesh contact with any of the 'other blacks' with whom Angela tried to form a Black Student Union or the 'adherents' that were drawn into it or the 'other black groups' she worked with before joining the party or those other irrelevant black souls Angela knew all her life, for, as Miss Regina's labels show, Angela's 'people' were not worth talking to anyway for whenever she needed a black view all she had to do was quote Frazier, DuBois, Baldwin or some other black with a real name, and not even Angela herself was a reliable source, for in the chapter 'Conversations in Jail' Miss Regina quotes exactly 23 words Angela actually spoke and they were directed to Margaret Burnham, the rest of them being culled from writings and speeches, so the consequence of this singularly parochial research is that Angela Davis is revealed to be pretty much like Regina Nadelson, an American. 'People see her as a black leader and as a liberated woman. There is something else that matters to me: she is an American.' And as for her personal regard for her subject, Miss Regina likes her; 'She is kind and funny.' Yessum, Miss Regina. We all are."  You can find an abridged transcript and additional show notes here at Literary Hub. You can buy Namwali Serpell's ON MORRISON at this link and anywhere books are sold. PASSAGES: On Morrison is a Random House production, hosted by Namwali Serpell. The podcast was created and produced by Sara McCrea. Sound design and technical direction by John DeLore. Campaign strategy and development, media partnerships by Carrie Neill. Publicity and tour coordination by Peter Dyer.