Measuring nonwhiteness: remembering Toni Morrison and Nina Simone

What does it mean when a mother of three can be shot down in broad daylight by a federal agent meant to protect communities? Renée Good was a poet. She was white and she was an American citizen. Even if the first attribute could be construed as a threat, in the larger American imagination, the latter two should have functioned as guarantees. They should have insulated her from harm. But they did not.

Good’s killing compels a more rigorous question: what is being guaranteed, and for whose protection does that guarantee exist? As the sociologist, Saida Grundy reminds us, the promise to safeguard white women in America has never been unconditional. It is honoured only so long as it serves the structure that sustains it, a structure that is at once patriarchal and white. When that order is threatened, the promise is broken. The alliance between white womanhood and white supremacy, we are reminded, is an arrangement. And arrangements, as we now see, may be withdrawn.

Nonwhiteness and power

Power may solicit criticism, even stage it as proof of its own openness, but it does not endure it unconditionally. After Good’s murder, the state moved quickly to defend itself. Both, the Department of Justice and Homeland Security framed the incident as necessary and inevitable. But some voices intervened. Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused the state’s narrative, while the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, rejected the official script. Their outrage unsettled the serene vocabulary of compliance, and the state’s inhumanity stood exposed. By now, however, inhumanity has become a familiar refrain.

Only a few days back, in the I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility in Baltimore, U.S. Representative, Jamie Raskin, saw non-white detainees, crowded into holding rooms, in the most demeaning of conditions. The account was shocking because it was conceivable within the state’s logic of governance. Dignity is elusive in a system that reduces non-whites into units to be managed. Cornel West called this the “niggerisation” of America. In the United States, the Black body has long functioned as the site upon which discipline is practised and paraded. However, the Black female body bears an additional weight, racialised and gendered at once, exposed to scrutiny, repression, and erasure.

Blackness as womanhood

Both Nina Simone (February 18) and Toni Morrison (February 21) were born this month. In simpler times, that fact might have invited a conventional tribute. Now it asks for something more exacting. Both were women. Both Black. Both of them knew what dehumanisation in America entailed. And for that, their works insist on a more precise form of remembrance.

In 1978, decades before I.C.E., Nina Simone sang of Baltimore. Her lyrics traced the weariness of a place where dignity was in shambles. To Simone, Baltimore was no longer a city in Maryland, but an index of exhaustion, a signifier of the human condition, a refrain. She listed the routine fatigue of a city, and the slow unravelling of the American dream. The song was political, but without the blunt force of “Mississippi Goddam” (1964). The latter marked Simone’s first unequivocal protest, written in the aftermath of the September 1963 bombing in Birmingham, when a white supremacist’s attack killed four young Black girls.

Racial violence was the theme and Simone’s performance bore its weight. Two years later, in 1966, in her “Four Women,” the crisis consuming Black women appeared with an undeniable immediacy. Race, gender, and historical trauma converged, accumulating and settling into lived experience. The dehumanisation of the Black woman was, Simone bemoaned, unrelenting. “Baltimore,” does not carry the force of conviction that we discern in other songs. Simone’s words are soft without being indulgent. She did not deny the racial discrimination and economic decline that marked the city. It showed in its streets, in the fatigue of its people. But Simone did not abandon the city to its failures. She looks at the city as it is, and attends to what is there. The song becomes an act of attention. It is an admission of love for a place, and for the idea of a place, which others have already written off.

The body as archive

Where Nina Simone confronts the nation in public, Toni Morrison confronts it in the intimate spaces of the home. The body becomes her stage. It thinks, and it remembers. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), Morrison maintained that racism works by taking away Black people’s inner life. In Beloved (1987), she worked to restore it. In it, the enslaved are no longer reduced to symbols of suffering. They think. They desire. They exercise the will to choose, and sometimes their choices are extreme. Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, embodies this fierce humanity. Her grisly act is not presented as pathology but as an excruciating decision forced by a world that treated her children as property. Such choices, Sethe soon realises, are accompanied by moral burden.

Memory restores interiority, and with it, dignity. The body remembers, Morrison reminds us. It thinks, and it carries history in every scar. Sethe had to remember her crime, because, murder, Morrison reiterates, is a crime. Yet through memory, through the difficult reclamation of what was done and why, she is rendered human again. The woman on whom the story is based was never granted that reckoning. It is a privilege Morrison crafts into her fiction.

Now, in America, fiction contends with fiction. Once, slavery required the fiction that the Black body was property. Our present requires a different fiction: that some bodies are threats to order, contaminants of the nation’s imagined purity. Before a body can be caged, it must first be stripped of its humanity, its memories. For memories disturb the neat categories imposed upon them. In our own moment, the categories have new names. Detainee. Alien. Words that perform erasure.

When Good was murdered, her body was enveloped in a language that was procedural. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that a body does not die procedurally. It dies as a body. It dies as someone who thought, remembered, feared, hoped.

The writer teaches Literature at Lady Shri Ram College. He is associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Published – February 20, 2026 08:30 am IST