When Black Lives Really Do Matter: Subverting Medical Racism through African-Diasporic Healing Rituals in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract

Abstract Toni Morrison spent much of her career detailing the unpredictability of African American existence within a racist society, with a special focus on patriarchal violence and medical apartheid against women’s bodies. Yet Morrison also limns out alternative modes of healing within a Black metacultural framework that moves between Nigeria, Brazil, and Egypt. As we move forward from the COVID-19 crisis, research has suggested that training more African American doctors, nurses, and physician assistants might curtail medical racism. Morrison’s fiction looks to a more basic level in which love of the bodies of African American people is at the center of healing. This article therefore discusses medical racism and applies Morrison’s lessons to the COVID-19 moment that her writing trenchantly foreshadows. It focuses on three healers who elide the medical establishment to embody a metacultural ethics of healing: Baby Suggs (in Beloved [1987]), Consolata Sosa (in Paradise [1997]), and Ethel Fordham (in Home [2012]). Morrison fuses an African-diasporic framework with embodied new knowledge that allows individuals to gain insight and agency in a white-dominant medical world that still refuses to endorse the idea that Black people’s bodies and psyches really do matter. An examination of these healers’ practices therefore sheds light on the COVID-19 moment by suggesting ways that African American people can stay “woke” and have agency when encountering and navigating traditional health care systems, which even today view the bodies of African Americans as fodder for medical experiments, immune to disease, and not in need of ethical and humane medical care.