Namwali Serpell

And

Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology.

And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist.

This isn't actually a problem of the black person.

This isn't something that we have to take up and push back against and defend ourself on.

As she says, you can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had a civilization, that we have art, that we have culture, but it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing.

And actually, the problem is not

The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity other than putting someone else down.

When I read that sort of thing – and I show it to my students because I think there is –

An assumption that for Morrison to win the Nobel Prize, to be this widely acclaimed, canonized author –

means that she would have escaped this kind of racist rhetoric.

And I think it's very important for people to understand what she actually had to confront, what she actually had to deal with, and how much more difficult it would have been for her to achieve what she did given those obstacles, given that this is the voice of The New York Times, the liberal-minded,

New York Times doing this big profile of this black woman writer who's just won a major award is on her third novel.

And this is the kind of rhetoric that's being used, right?

It's kind of remarkable.

I felt that there was a desire to take her down a couple of notches.

There was this assumption that she couldn't possibly have been that good.

And the thing about it is, you know, I...

As I started writing the book, as I started researching the book, I was seeing all of this haunting Morrison as she's coming up in her career.

And there are all these moments in the archives where she feels that she's being mistreated by publishers, by people who've invited her to travel to other countries, that there's a kind of constant...