Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese :: Biography Biographies Essays

Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese In this I essay will be discussing two unique authors, Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Morrison is a Nobel Prize winning author, and Fox-Genovese, is a history professor at Harvard. Both of these women have interesting perspectives on race and gender. According to the articles I have read, Toni and Fox-Genovese claim the way people view women and minorities is wrong. In a Vibe Magazine interview, Toni claims that In a recent British nanny case, there was "complaint about the mother not being home with child...she she should have been home with her children, said some people" (Vibe 1998 p.2). Morrison states that it would be an entirely different situation, had the mother been a poor black women. A black women "should work, even if that work is taking care of somebady else's children" (Vibe 1998). This is a wrong way to look at things; "we fought a long time to have 'Women taking care of children' understood to be work. Now its understood to be something else" (Vibe 1998 p.3). According to Toni, people size up who you are by what you look like, what your name is, and by what you do. However this is only "part of who you are. When I was a little girl, a man came up to me and said, 'are you a Willis?' - referring to my mother's maiden name-'I thought so, by the way you walk.' I moved to New York and people said, 'What do you do' So you say' I'm a writer..but you that's only part of who you are" (Vibe 1998 p.3). Often people wrap their identity in what they do. This can be troublesome when your not performing to someones expectations, one might think there is some thing wrong with who they are, which is not true. The same thing applies to gender and race. It is unfair to already have a preconcieved notion about someone without checking him or her out first. Fox-Genovese claims that many articles of literature exclude certain people. Like Morrison, Fox-Genovese agrees that elite culture "denied the values and perceptions of all others and imposed itself as an absolute standard" (Fox-Genovese 1998).