Nobel Prize-winning author Tony Morrison died last week at the age of 88.

Novels like Beloved and the Blueest Eye established her as one of America's greatest writers,

someone who captured truths about our broadly shared humanity without flinching away from

the visceral specificity of the Black American experience.

I'm thinking about Morrison this week, not just because of her passing, though, but because of her politics.

Morrison didn't write in a vacuum.

As an editor at Random House, she published Black radical activists, like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton.

And importantly, for the purposes of this episode, she advocated for inclusion and solidarity in the context of the movements of her time.

In 1981, she delivered a speech at the American Writers' Congress that called on writers

to join in solidarity against often harsh and isolating conditions in the publishing industry.

Morrison said, romanticized and misapplied.

Individualism keeps us self-indulgent.

It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership

between author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher

and writer, she went on to say, the political philosophy of the country chants its love of individualism. The nature

of our work makes us prize it. The corporate compulsion of the industry fosters it. But it is

not as individuals that we are abused and silenced. It is as writers. We need protection

in the form of structure, an accessible organization that is truly

representative of the diverse interests of all writers, an organization committed to the rights

of the few, and we need protection in the form of clarity, a knowledge of the limits of individualism, and the private, indulgent

suffering it fosters.

Of course, the context that compels me currently isn't that of authorship.

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