Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Bioethics Imagination

In 1992 Toni Morrison published a perceptive analysis of American fiction entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. She maintained that the major themes and assumptions of American fiction, "autonomy, authority, and absolute power," were shaped and activated by a complex reaction to Africanism. She was not reacting to racist tracts such as Rev. Thomas Dixon's play, The Clansman, best known as the cinematic racist apocalypse The Birth of a Nation. Rather, she looked at the literature of Cather, Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, and O'Connor, writers who seemed to possess some insight into the wrongness of racism.

It is fascinating that so much of what Morrison said about American fiction applies equally well to American bioethics. Autonomy has become a championed and revered individualism. Authority is lifted up to a romantic heroism waged against a raw, half-savage natural and mental landscape (Morrison 1992, 44-45). A more precisely targeted description of the naive pride lying behind the promotion of failed advance directives is difficult to imagine. Eventually, according to Morrison, this kind of individualism takes fiction to the prototype of the solitary and alienated American. This too seems a fair characterization of the inability of bioethics to articulate the moral standing of familial and local communities. Even bioethics' fetishized attention to the blood taboo of the Jehovah's Witnesses, the genetic purity of cloned offspring, and postmortem sperm donation is presaged by Morrison, who says that whiteness in reaction to Africanism focuses on blood contamination and sexuality. Perhaps Morrison has simply identified the characteristics of American, rather than racialized, thinking.

Morrison's analysis of the whiteness of American letters and Catherine Myser's (2003) analysis of the whiteness of bioethics would be little more than intellectually interesting if they merely pointed out the high white ground of bioethics' focus on heroic individualism. To be serviceable, such an analysis must look to the social role of literature and bioethics in ratifying the racial divisions of U.S. culture. Morrison points out that whiteness maintains the barricades that mark class and privilege within a divided society. Whiteness does this by speaking of the fear or threat of being expelled to the "other" side, where reason and civilization are supplanted by an irrational world of communal interdependence and instinctual bodies.

Myser also points beyond the shallow question of "Are bioethicists racist bigots?" to a more profound question: What would bioethics look like in a society that had reflected on the conceptual and social political legacy of its racist foundations? If, for example, the color of the U.S. population were inverted and 25% (instead of 6%) of its citizens were on Medicaid, would bioethics then take on interstate differences in Medicaid coverage as an issue in justice and federal rationing? If 28% (about three times the current male risk of getting Alzheimer's disease) of U.S. men spent time in prison (instead of the 4% of white men who have this experience), would the ethics of correctional healthcare still be a shunned topic? African Americans prefer home care to nursing homes and are more likely to undertake family duties to delay nursing-home care. (Cagney and Agree 1999; McCann et al. 2000; Navaie-Waliser et al. 2001; Foley, Tung, and Multran 2002). A diverse American bioethics might advocate for better home care where a white bioethics guarding boundaries and reacting to the fear of expulsion to a community of disease diverts boundless energy to the solution of assisted suicide. Bioethicists are not bigots, but the speech and silence of bioethics says that the field should answer Myser's question, "Is bioethics white?"