Beloved Citizens: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Racial Inequality, and American Public Policy

Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved (1987) provides a lens through which to examine how social assistance shapes African American freedom. One dominant interpretation of the novel has been that it implicitly argues for the importance of recognizing the historical legacies of slavery upon African American lives. For example, James Berger claims that the novel counters 1980s neoconservative arguments of black cultural pathology by showing that “law and science, power and official knowledge continue to violate African American lives” (1996, 411). And George Shulman argues that the novel shows that addressing the historical legacies of racial exclusion must be an ongoing rather than temporary process, giving readers “the feeling of urgency and political necessity of a redemption people must seek but cannot guarantee, must not preclude but cannot possess” (2008, 202). These scholars point to the novel’s central narrative, which depicts a postbellum community of ex-slaves in Cincinnati grappling with the traumatic legacy of slavery as it is embodied in an infant ghost named Beloved, who was murdered by her mother, Sethe, in an effort to save the child from enslavement.

What remains unexplored is how another narrative thread, in which the characters struggle to create a flourishing community during Reconstruction with few economic resources or opportunities, examines the effect of divergent models of social assistance on African American lives. As a work of literature rather than of political theory, Beloved does not provide direct arguments about politics. Furthermore, it does not directly advocate for certain public policies. But I suggest that it nonetheless examines how social assistance that is contingent upon work and adherence to normative moral standards reinforces African American marginalization, whereas unconditional social assistance has a greater potential to mitigate it. The novel thus offers important insights into the politics of debt: conditional social assistance is a further extension of the legacy of slavery because it makes African Americans indebted to American society for whatever aid they receive—aid often needed because of social conditions created by slavery. In contrast, the novel shows how unconditional social assistance, which imposes no debt upon recipients, can more effectively address the legacy of racial oppression. Over a quarter century after Beloved’s publication, these observations are valuable for conceptualizing the relationship between contemporary public assistance programs and racial inequality in the United States.

It is through the character of Edward Bodwin, a white former abolitionist, that Morrison most obviously dramatizes how conditional social assistance exacerbates African American marginalization. There is good reason to accept Berger’s claim that Bodwin represents a tradition of postwar white liberalism that condescends toward African Americans, while providing them with jobs and housing (1996, 417). Berger suggests that Sethe’s attack upon Bodwin at the novel’s conclusion represents Morrison’s repudiation of white liberal paternalism and her simultaneous acknowledgment that liberals’ historic commitment to assisting African Americans nonetheless deserves respect. But a closer reading reveals that Morrison actually links Bodwin’s assistance to his paternalistic attitude. What she shows is that his assistance actually tethers aid to work, available to recipients only on the condition that individuals adhere to moral standards of conduct that he defines. For these characters to receive assistance to help meet their most basic needs, Bodwin keeps them entirely dependent upon his authority and low-wage labor.

Morrison illustrates that Bodwin’s type of aid effectively reproduces African American economic marginalization. Whereas Suggs performs certain domestic tasks for Bodwin in exchange for financial support, tasks such as cobbling, canning, and laundry and seamstress work, she dies with few assets and, on her deathbed, describes herself as nothing but “a nigger woman hauling shoes” (Morrison 1987, 179). And although Denver does nighttime domestic work for Bodwin, she seeks out extra opportunities to make money, still struggling to support herself and her destitute mother, Sethe: “She had heard about an afternoon job at the shirt factory. She hoped that with her night work at the Bodwins’ and another one, she could put away something and help her mother too” (266). In this way, Morrison points to Bodwin’s profit...