Anti-Black Violence and Toni Morrison’s Democratic Storytelling

More people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being rooted in Black women’s lack of “narrative capital” and has called on women to “share their stories” of violence to occasion greater mobilization. In this essay, I argue that the work of Toni Morrison, and specifically her conception of truant democracy, provides a blueprint for how and with whom Black women should share their stories—that is, for how they should mobilize the narrative capital they have and build more. I make this argument by juxtaposing the democratic visions of Morrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, including the ethical foundations of their envisioned democracies, the forms of violence to which they attend, their visions of justice, and the people—or, in Morrison’s case, the ephemeral collectives—they sought to build via storytelling.