Recitatif Toni Morrison Analysis

Without thinking twice race is often something most people use to identify and classify individuals by. In the short story, “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison provides us with evidence of how we unconsciously use race to identity, define, and categorize individuals, showing how prevalent the use of stereotypes are in a society. She uses different ambiguous encounters between the two characters of different race to convey her purpose. Her goal was to force the reader to stop and think about what truly defines someone in the end giving them a new perceptive on why judging an individual based upon stereotypical standards in usually incorrect. By Morrison making this conscious decision not to disclose which character was which race, she calls attention

There’s many different things that are used to classify people for example, education. A simple thing like education can tell a person a great amount of information about an individual. Morrison fails to mention race, but subtly drops class codes about education when explaining why Twyla and Roberta get alone so well. The author reveals this relationship through the personal narrative of eight year old Twyla, “We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher” (Morrison 132). Their education level is one of the first things the reader discovers about the girls. Morrison placed this piece of information there to immediately shape the way the reader thinks of each character. The author mentioned education because education and race are often linked

During Twyla’s shift one day she spots Roberta sitting in a booth with big wild hair, a powdered blue halter top, shorts, earrings the size of bracelets, a great amount of makeup while sitting next to two men (Morrison 136). Morrison picked this particular scene to purposely change the reader’s previous assumptions about the two characters that were formed after reading the first encounter. She paints Twyla as lower/working class by showing that in order for her to survive and make a living she had to work. This class code is perceived as lower class and the majority of people often associate this with African Americans. Meanwhile, Roberta was painted as an upper class member without any worries based upon her appearance, her attitude, and the fact that she was traveling to follow Jimi Hendrix. This description is supposed to cause the reader to immediately link Roberta with upper class which typically is associated with Caucasian. In this particular encounter Morrison chooses to paint Twyla and Roberta in the opposite light of what she painted them in during the first encounter. The purpose of presenting them at a different angle was to achieve a shift in the reader’s belief and show that often times you can’t jump to conclusions because they are not always necessarily