LIT 2000 Lecture 4.2 transcript

Hello, LIT 2000 students, and welcome to lecture 4.2. Today, we're exploring Toni Morrison's short story, Sweetness. This is a narrative that challenges us to examine the painful way that maternal love, generational trauma, and systemic racism interact. Toni Morrison is one of the most brilliant chroniclers of the American experience and she uses this brief but devastating text to dissect how external societal oppression can break into the sanctuary of the home and transform the intimate bond between a mother and her child into a site of cold and pragmatic discipline.

Make sure that you've read this story before watching this lecture and keep your guided notes open so you can fill them in as we go. Remember that your literature discussion will ask you to refer to a specific example from this lecture. So there is a place in your notes to jot that down. Sweetness is a difficult story to read, but I chose it because it will address several of the big topics that we've been thinking about and examining over the past few weeks. and it does a good job of setting up a lot of the readings that we're going to read over the course of the semester all the way through to the very end when we read a raisin in the sun.

So to fully engage with the story, we have to begin by talking about the primary motor of the story's conflict and that is colorism. Racism refers to prejudice or discrimination directed against individuals based on their membership in a particular racial group, which is typically a group that's in power against other groups that are typically minority groups or groups with less power. Colorism is different. It's an internalized subset of racial prejudice.

Colorism is the systemic discrimination or bias practiced against individuals with darker skin tones, but it's often originating within the same ethnic or racial community. It's a legacy of white supremacy, and it assigns social value, beauty, safety, and privilege to lighter skin while penalizing darker skin tones. And this operates often from within a minority group. In Sweetness, Morrison gives voice to a light-skinned black mother who demands to be called Sweetness by her daughter, rejecting the warm, instinctual title that most kids would use, mama.

From the very first sentence of the story, Sweetness addresses the reader directly, adopting an apologetic yet fiercely defensive posture. She says, "It's not my fault, so you can't blame me. I didn't do it, and I have no idea how it happened." What is it? It is the birth of her daughter, Lula Ann, who was born with skin so dark that Sweetness describes it as a shock, a surprise that horrified her and her husband, Louis.

Notice how Morrison doesn't present colorism simply as an abstract idea that Sweetness believes. She shows us what happens when an idea becomes part of someone's everyday behavior. Sweetness has internalized a system of racial hierarchy so deeply that she begins making decisions based on it before anyone else even has to tell her what to do. And there's another important connection here to what we learned in the previous lecture about unreliable narrators.

Sweetness is not necessarily unreliable because she's deliberately lying to us. In fact, one of the most interesting things about her narration is that she seems to believe her own explanation. And for me and hopefully for you, this has created an uncomfortable position for us as readers because we can understand why sweetness is afraid. But we don't have to accept her behavior as justified. These two ideas can exist at the same time.

This is an important habit to get into when you're doing literary analysis. Resist the urge to turn complicated characters into simple categories. Instead of asking, is Sweetness good or bad? We need to ask what forces have shaped Sweetness's choices and what are the consequences of those choices. Morrison asks us to hold several truths together at once. Sweetness has been harmed by racism and colorism. She has internalize those systems.

She then passes some of that damage onto her daughter and Lula Ann must eventually create an identity separate from the one her mother has imposed on her. Here's where we must use our analytical lenses that we are developing to look beneath Sweetness's self-justifications. How does Sweetness respond to this terror? She chooses to raise Lula Ann with extreme coldness and strictness. She avoids holding her hand in public.

She refuses to show her physical affection and she constantly scolds her. And she justifies this cruelty by framing it as a maternal duty. She tells us, "I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down, how to be quiet and obedient. In Sweetness's mind, a dark-skinned black girl who is confident, loud, or assertive will be destroyed by a white supremacist society. Therefore, Sweetness breaks her daughter's spirit at home so the world outside won't break her body later.

I hope if you didn't see this incredibly heartbreaking aspect of the story while you were reading it, now it's starting to help you make connections. And one of the ways that Morrison helps you make connections is by relying on vivid metaphors. And this will help illustrate the depth of sweetness's internalized trauma. Consider how she describes her newborn baby's skin. She compares it to a crow or a shadow. And these are not positive words.

These are words associated with threat or a dark omen. A mother's first gaze at her child should be filled with warmth, but sweetness's gaze is mediated through the lens of racial fear. Her first thought for her baby is fear. The baby's skin is a metaphor for the systemic danger waiting outside the front door. The color of Lula Ann's body becomes an unyielding wall between mother and daughter. In addition to metaphor, pay careful attention to the sparse dialogue embedded within Sweetness's internal monologue.

Dialogue in literature is never just functional conversation. Dialogue reveals power dynamics and emotional distance. One of the most heartbreaking exchanges in the story revolves around what Lula Ann is allowed to call her mother. Sweetness tells us, "I told her to stop calling me mama and call me sweetness instead. It was safer for her." As the narrative progresses, we witness the tragic legacy of this maternal script.

Lula Ann grows up, leaves home, changes her name to bride, and dresses exclusively in striking pristine white clothes. She becomes a wildly successful, confident businesswoman. She embraces the very dark skin that her mother treated as a curse, turning it into the centerpiece of her beauty and her brand. Yet, the emotional damage runs deep. Of course, it does. Bride cuts off all contact with Sweetness, sending her only a monthly check.

And this check, you can think of it as a cold monetary transaction that mirrors the cold transactional childhood that Sweetness provided. At the conclusion of the story, Sweetness receives a letter from Bride announcing that she is pregnant. Sweetness ends her monologue with a chilling prediction about what awaits her daughter. She reflects on the pain of motherhood, warning that bride is about to find out how hard it is to protect a child in this world.

Sweetness states, "Listen to me. You are about to find out what it's like. Her newborn will change her life forever. It will hurt and it will hurt bad." When we synthesize sweetness with Jamaica Kinkaid's girl, the conversation between these two texts becomes striking. Both works explore the complex, often painful relationship between mothers and daughters operating under systemic oppression. In Girl, the maternal voice delivers a relentless script designed to force the young girl into respectable Antiguan womanhood.

In Sweetness, the mother uses emotional distance and strict discipline to mold Lula Ann so that she can survive in a colorist white supremacist society. This next section is what you're going to cite in your literature discussion board post. Consider how both mothers define their duty. Neither one of them acts out of pure malice. Instead, they're both terrified. The mother and girl fears her daughter will become a social outcast.

Sweetness fears her daughter will be physically or emotionally destroyed because of her dark skin. Both writers demonstrate how generational trauma is transmitted through parenting. Maternal love, which ought to be a source of unconditional protection, is distorted into a tool of constraint. The mothers enforce societal biases within the home so that their daughters will be equipped to handle those same biases outside the home.

Morrison leaves us with a profound troubling dilemma. On the one hand, Sweetness is an abusive, cold mother who inflicted deep psychological wounds on her innocent child due to her own internalized colorism. On the other hand, Morrison forces us to recognize that sweetness did not invent colorism. Sweetness is herself a victim of a society that taught her to despise dark skin. Her coldness was a defense mechanism. It was a warped tragic survival strategy spawned by systemic oppression.

When you write about sweetness or girl in your discussions and your essays, you need to avoid simple binary judgments. Do not merely label sweetness as a bad mother and move on. Instead, think about how Morrison uses first-person narration, dialogue, metaphor, and imagery to reveal the human cost of systemic racism. Show how external societal constraints penetrate domestic spaces, corrupting the language of love and turning maternal care into a script of cold survival.

All right, so that was pretty heavy, but I hope you saw how literature can show a whole lot about the struggles of a society and the struggles of the people within a society without ever just saying this is what colorism is. Colorism is bad. So, let's take a moment to make sure that you have these literary terms defined in your notes. You'll be responsible for these terms when you do your literary terms glossery. So, just make sure that you have them in your notes now to save you time later.

And I'll see you in our final lecture of unit one where we turn to Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants, which is a story built almost entirely out of what's left unsaid. Make sure you look at the reading notes in the module before you start reading so that you know to look for the story under the story. and I'll see you there.