William Eric Waters, aka Easy Waters

Toni Morrison writes that Moby Dick is “[a] complex, heaving, disorderly, profound text.” In my attempt, in my teens and twenties, to read as many “classics” as possible, I set out, like Ahab, to conquer the great white whale of a book. Moby Dick, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (because so much of the story is written in a vernacular that is not true to my understanding of Blackspeak), were my most difficult reads. Morrison, though, in slaying Moby Dick in her 1988 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of Michigan, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” makes me want to, again, go after the great white whale. In 1988, Morrison brought an analysis and literary critique to Moby Dick that had not been seen or considered by other critics.

When we critique the current state of politics in the “United States of America,” specifically the banning of or proposed banning of books written by people of color, including Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the “unspeakable things” are being spoken out loud by some white people. Again, America is whitewashing her history, right before our very eyes, and attempting to erase the Afro-American presence in history and literature.

When we assess the American literary canon, which Morrison refers to as “canon fodder” – so many shades of meaning, and Morrison throws some shade in using this term – we see the intentional disregard if not erasure of “The Afro-American Presence in Literature.”

In the classic that is Moby Dick, Morrison writes:

Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship’s voyage, its point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it…. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis – strangely of no interest to psychiatry. Ahab, then, is navigating between an idea of civilization that he renounces and an idea of savagery he must annihilate, because the two cannot coexist. The former is based on the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is that the idea of savagery is not the missionary one: it is white racial ideology that is savage and if, indeed a white, nineteenth-century, American male took on, not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions or their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, very desperate, and very doomed. Madness would be the only appropriate description of such audacity, and “he heaves me,” the most succinct and appropriate description of that obsession. (emphasis supplied)

            I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in some simple and simpleminded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology. [Think the White Man’s Burden, and Manifest Destiny.]

In the last presidential election, the Democrats unsuccessfully posited a position that circumnavigated speaking about whiteness as a political ideology. When the Democrats were trying to slay the great white whale that Trump had become, they dealt in “philosophical and metaphysical” attacks that were beyond the ken of the people they were trying to win over, who would ultimately support and vote for Trump and return him to the Oval Office. For what exactly was this “existential threat” that the Democrats claimed that Trump posed to Democracy? And I don’t think that had the Democrats attacked Trump on something less philosophical and metaphysical, such as whiteness as political ideology – in simpler language – in his appeal to white nationalists and white supremacists, to take our country back in time, that they would have been any more successful, especially because Ahab was personified in a woman of color.

“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903 in the opening paragraph of The Souls of Black Folk. Already a quarter of a century into the Twenty-first Century, we see evidence that the “problem” continues to be the color-line. Despite an attempted coup (January 6^th) and 35 felony convictions, Americans put Trump back in the Oval Office. In his first 100 days back in office, carrying out the Agenda of Project 2025, Trump is seeking to “Make America Great Again,” redux. (Whatever is meant by that!) Large segments of the white population eat this rhetoric up, and even some people of color, perhaps forgetting 246 years of slavery (1619-1865), fifty-eight years of legal segregation (1896-1954), fourteen years (1954-1968) of de facto segregation, and thirty-two years (1968-2000) of “mass incarceration” (better described as hyperincarceration because of the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color).

In his 1951 essay, “Many Thousands Gone,” James Baldwin declared, “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom are dead.” As prophetic as Baldwin was, he could not foresee a Candace Owens or Supreme Clarence Thomas on the “Negro stage” in 2025, or the Black and Latino men who voted for an individual (Trump) who catered to white supremacists and white nationalists instead of a Black woman (Kamala Harris), who just might have brought some “joy” to our political process, but joy is not a political strategy..

Moby Dick endures as a classic. One thing that makes a classic is the lessons we can extract in our own time in our own country. Beyond the whaling industry, Moby Dick is a call to action that we cannot let the savages of white racial ideology consume or destroy us. In fact, we must slay it, by any means necessary!