Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how members of her family survived the indignities of the segregation era by passing as white and her belief that her daughter's color will always be a burden. Although the mother raises the child to act deferentially in society, the daughter rebels by embracing the beauty of her black skin and goes on to have a successful career in California. The mother reveals in her narration that she lives in a nursing home and that her daughter recently wrote to share the news that she is pregnant. The mother is bitter that the daughter doesn't include a return address and rarely comes to visit.
Although "Sweetness" is narrated from a present-day frame, the mother's recollections track changing attitudes toward the concepts of colorism and passing within the African-American community. Rather than accept responsibility for the prejudice she feels towards her daughter's dark skin, the mother shares the historical context of her family living with Jim Crow racial segregation laws, which prompted some of her relatives to use the privileges their light skin afforded them and pass as white. The mother is so used to concealing and denying her own black identity that she feels frightened of her daughter's visible blackness. By the end of the story, the mother maintains that she did her best, but goes some way to acknowledging that it was misguided to raise her daughter to act as though she is inferior to light-skinned people. The mother comments that "blue-black" people are now featured in TV, magazines, and fashion, which suggests the culture has changed to become less discriminatory.
First published as a short story in the February 2, 2015 edition of The New Yorker, "Sweetness" was excerpted from the first chapter of Morrison's novel God Help the Child, released the following April. In the novel, Morrison switches to the daughter's perspective and shows the circumstances that lead her to reject her mother's colorism and embrace her own beauty. Although the story is technically a novel chapter, some consider "Sweetness" to be only the second short story Morrison ever published in her career.
