Morrison

ADDED:

  "The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture." But "excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. . . . A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist," she says. "All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes."