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

Novels like Beloved and the Bluest Die 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 chanced 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

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