Loving Mean: Racialized Medicine and the Rise of Postwar Eugenics in Toni Morrison’s Home

Abstract

This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) against the backdrop of the United States’ well-documented patterns of unconstrained experimentation on racial-minority patients. The essay focuses specifically on contexts of mid-century eugenics, which exposed black Americans, often women, to nonconsensual and nontherapeutic surgical procedures. I argue that Home is not only informed by these traumatic histories of medical violence but is also able to construct an ethics of care out of them through the imperative of loving mean–a de-idealized love concerned less with sympathy than with survival. In so doing, the novel advances intersubjective forms of healing that challenge the systemic roots of reproductive racism and make possible the potential for meaningful recovery from both physical and historical trauma.