Black on white violence sustained in Sula"What about white women? They chase you [black men] in every corner of the earth, they feel you under every bed. I knew that a white woman wouldn't leave the house after six for fear one of you would kidnap her... They think they'll see a rape on you soon, and if they don't get the rape they're looking for, they'll scream about it anyway just so the search won't be in vain. " (Morrison) This is how Sula, the heroine of Toni Morrison's novel, refers to what she believes is every white woman's secret desire to be raped by a black man. Morrison, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, is now one of the most frequently assigned writers in university literature courses, and her novel Sula (1973) is certainly the most popular of her works. Millions of college students have read this book, and it is safe to say that Morrison's vision of the word, particularly of the white world, makes a great impression on impressionable minds. Plotless Sula is the story of a friendship between two black women: Sula and Nel. The relationship between the women takes place against the backdrop of malicious, evil white men insulting and perpetrating other outrages against blacks in general and against black women in particular. For example, Nel's mother is scolded by a white conductor for being in the white section of a Southern train. train: "What were you doing in that carriage over there?...No mistakes are made on this train. Now work your ass off in there." As Nel and her mother advance south, even the public toilets marked WOMEN OF COLOR disappear: the women are forced to relieve themselves in "a field of tall grass on the opposite side of the track" and Nel eventually learn to "fold leaves". " expertly. Later in the novel, Sula and Nel are t... middle of paper... 11-13, 1997), white studies guru Noel Ignatiev observed, "Now that white studies has become an industry academic, with its own factory of theses, conferences, publications and no doubt soon its own junior faculty, it is time for abolitionists to declare their position on it. Abolitionism is first and foremost a political project: abolitionists' study of whiteness in order to abolish it... Whiteness is not simply oppressive and false, it is nothing other than oppressive and false. As James Baldwin said, “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” Perhaps people like Morrison and Ignatiev believe that whiteness can be stripped from white women, since the offspring produced by such violent unions will not be white. This would certainly be a way for blacks to “survive” the “evil” that is whites, as Morrison describes them..