#oberlin commencement

[nonesuchrecords]

Congratulations to Rhiannon Giddens, who will deliver the keynote address at Oberlin College and Conservatory’s Class of 2024 Commencement ceremony on Monday, May 27, which will be livestreamed. Giddens, who studied opera at the Conservatory and graduated in 2000, will be awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree during the ceremony. "A consummate musician, equally noteworthy for her accomplishments as a performer, composer, scholar, lyricist, and more, Rhiannon Giddens stands as one of the most important creative and artistic voices of our time," Dean of the Conservatory William Quillen says. "Throughout her work, Giddens has brought to light previously overlooked or suppressed voices and histories.” Read more here.

[mimosita]

[Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true. And every day that you sit back silent, refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in our name.

Our federal taxes contribute $3 billion yearly in military and economic aid to Israel. Over $200 million of that money is spent fighting the uprising of Palestinian people who are trying to end the military occupation of their homeland. Israeli soldiers fire tear gas canisters made in America into Palestinian homes and hospitals, killing babies, the sick, and the elderly. Thousands of Palestinians, some as young as twelve, are being detained without trial in barbed-wired detention camps, and even many Jews of conscience opposing these acts have also been arrested and detained.]

Commencement Address Audre Lorde, Oberlin College

May 29, 1989

[lowcountry-gothic]

We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. Feel what that means.

Audre Lorde, commencement address at Oberlin College on May 29, 1989

[sisteroutsiders]

Audre Lorde's 1989 Commencement Address to graduates of Oberlin College

Audre Lorde

Oberlin College

May 29, 1989

I congratulate you all on this moment of your lives. Most people don't remember their commencement addresses. Next year, when someone asks you who spoke at graduation, I wonder what you will say. I remember she was a middle-aged Black woman. I remember she had a nice voice. I remember she was a poet. But what did she say? After all, there are no new ideas. Only new ways of making those ideas real and active through our lives. What you most of all of do not need right now is more rhetoric. What you need are facts you don't ordinarily get to help you fashion weapons that matter for the war in which we are all engaged. A war for survival in the twenty-first century, the survival of this planet and all this planet's people.

Thanks to Jesse Jackson (Poem)

The US and the USSR are the most powerful countries in the world but only 1/8 of the world's population African people are also 1/8 of the world's population. 1/2 of the world's population is Asian. 1/2 of that number is Chinese. There are 22 nations in the Middle East. Not three.

Most people in the world are Yellow, Black, Brown, Poor, Female Non-Christian and do not speak english.

By the year 2000 the 20 largest cities in the world will have two things in common none of them will be in Europe and none in the United States.

You are all so very beautiful. But I have seen special and beautiful before, and I ask myself where are they now? What makes you different? Well, to begin with, you are different because you have asked me to come and speak with you from my heart, on what is a very special day for each of you. So when they ask you, who spoke at your commencement, remember this: I am a Black feminist lesbian warrior poet doing my work, and a piece of my work is asking you, how are you doing yours? And when they ask you, what did she say, tell them I asked you the most fundamental question of your life—who are you, and how are you using the powers of that self in the service of what you believe?

You are inheriting a country that has grown hysterical with denial and contradiction. Last month in space five men released a satellite that is on its way to the planet Venus, and the infant mortality rate in the capital of this nation is higher than in Kuwait. We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. Feel what that means. It is a reality that haunts each of our lives and that can help inform our dreams. It's not about altruism, it's about self-preservation. Survival.

A twenty-eight-year-old white woman is beaten and raped in Central Park. Eight Black boys are arrested and accused of taking part in a rampage against joggers. That is a nightmare that affects each of our lives. I pray for the body and soul of every one of these young people trapped in this compound tragedy of violence and social reprisal. None of us escapes the brutalization of the other. Using who we are, testifying with our lives to what we believe is not altruism, it is a question of self-preservation. Black children did not declare war upon this system, it is the system which declared war upon Black children, both female and male.

Ricky Boden, eleven, Staten Island, killed by police, 1972. Clifford Glover, ten, Queens, New York, killed by police, 1975. Randy Evans, fourteen, Bronx, New York, killed by police, 1976. Andre Roland, seventh grader, found hanged in Columbia, Missouri, after being threatened for dating a white girl. The list goes on. You are strong and intelligent. Your beauty and your promise lie like a haze over your faces. I beg you, do not waste it. Translate that power and beauty into action wherever you find yourself to be, or you will participate in your own destruction.

I have no platitudes for you. Before most of you are thirty, 10 percent of you will be involved with space traffic and 10 percent of you will have contracted AIDS. This disease which may yet rival the plague of the Dark Ages is said to have originated in Africa, spontaneously and inexplicably jumping from the green monkey to man. Yet in 1969, twenty years ago, a book entitled A Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare, written by John Cookson and Judith Nottingham, published by Monthly Review Press, discussed green monkey disease as a fatal blood, tissue, and venereally transmitted virus which is an example of a whole new class of disease-causing organisms, and of biological warfare interest. It also discussed the possibilities of this virus being genetically manipulated to produce "new" organisms.

But I do have hope. To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair—despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless. This diploma is a piece of your power. You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation—survival.

Each one of us in this room is privileged. You have a bed, and you do not go to it hungry. We are not part of those millions of homeless people roaming america today. Your privilege is not a reason for guilt, it is part of your power, to be used in support of those things you say you believe. Because to absorb without use is the gravest error of privilege. The poorest one-fifth of this nation became 7 percent poorer in the last ten years, and the richest one-fifth of the nation became 11 percent richer. How much of your lives are you willing to spend merely protecting your privileged status? ls that more than you are prepared to spend putting your dreams and beliefs for a better world into action? That is what creativity and empowerment [are] all about. The rest is destruction. And it will have to be one or the other.

It is not enough to believe in justice. The median income for Black and Hispanic families has fallen in the last three years, while the median income of white families rose 1.5 percent. We are eleven years away from a new century, and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan can still be elected to Congress from the Republican party in Louisiana. Little fourteen-year-old Black boys in the seventh grade are still being lynched for dating a white girl. It is not enough to say we are against racism.

It is not enough to believe in everyone's right to her or his own sexual preference. Homophobic jokes are not just fraternity high jinks. Gay bashing is not just fooling around. Less than a year ago a white man shot two white women in their campsite in Pennsylvania, killing one of them. He pleaded innocent, saying he had been maddened by their making love inside their own tent. If you were sitting on that jury, what would you decide?

It is not enough to believe anti-Semitism is wrong, when the vandalism of synagogues is increasing, amid the homegrown fascism of hate groups like the Christian Identity and Tom Metzger's American Front. The current rise in jokes against Jewish women masks anti-Semitism as well as women hatred. What are you going to say the next time you hear a JAP story?

We do not need to become each other in order to work together. But we do need to recognize each other, our differences as well as the sameness of our goals. Not for altruism. For self-preservation—survival.

Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true. And every day that you sit back silent, refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in our name.

Our federal taxes contribute $3 billion yearly in military and economic aid to Israel. Over $200 million of that money is spent fighting the uprising of Palestinian people who are trying to end the military occupation of their homeland. Israeli solders fire tear gas canisters made in america into Palestinian homes and hospitals, killing babies, the sick, and the elderly. Thousands of Palestinians, some as young as twelve, are being detained without trial in barbed-wired detention camps, and even many Jews of conscience opposing these acts have also been arrested and detained. 

Encouraging your congresspeople to press for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and for recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people, is not altruism, it is survival. 

In particular, my sisters and brothers, I urge you to remember, while we battle the many faces of racism in our daily lives as African Americans, that we are part of an international community of people of Color, and people of the African diaspora around the world are looking to us and asking, how are we using the power we have? Or are we allowing our power to be used against them, our brothers and sisters in struggle for their liberation?

Apartheid is a disease spreading out from South Africa across the whole southern tip of Africa. This genocidal system in South Africa is kept propped into place by the military and economic support of the U.S., Israel, and Japan. Let me say here that I support the existence of the state of Israel as I support the existence of the U.S.A., but this does not blind me to the grave injustices emanating from either. Israel and South Africa are intimately entwined, politically and economically. There are no diamonds in Israel, yet diamonds are Israel's major source of income. Meanwhile, Black people slave in the diamond mines of South Africa for less than thirty cents a day.

It is not enough to say we are against apartheid. Forty million of our tax dollars go as aid to the South Africa-backed UNITA forces to suppress an independent Angola. Our dollars pay for the land mines responsible for over 50,000 Angolan amputees. It appears that Washington is joining hands with South Africa to prevent [the] independence of Namibia. Now make no mistake. South Africa, Angola, Namibia will be free. But what will we say when our children ask us, what were you doing, mommy and daddy, while american-made bullets were murdering Black children in Soweto?

In this country, children of all colors are dying of neglect. Since 1980, poverty has increased 30 percent among white children in america. Fifty percent of African American children and 30 percent of Latino children grow up in poverty, and that percentage is even higher for the indigenous people of this land, American Indians. While the Magellan capsule speeds through space toward the planet Venus, thirty children on this planet earth die every minute from hunger and inadequate health care. And in each one of those minutes, $1,700,000 are spent on war.

The white fathers have told us: "l think, therefore I am." But the Black mother within each one of us—the poet inside—whispers in our dreams: "I feel, therefore I can be free." Learn to use what you feel to move you toward action. Change, personal and political, does not come about in a day, nor a year. But it is our day-to-day decisions, the way in which we testify with our lives to those things in which we say we believe, that empower us. Your power is relative, but it is real. And if you do not learn to use it, it will be used, against you, and me, and our children. Change did not begin with you, and it will not end with you, but what you do with your life is an absolutely vital piece of that chain. The testimony of your daily living is the missing remnant in the fabric of our future.

There are so many different parts to each of us. And there are so many of us. If we can envision the future we desire, we can work to bring it into being. We need all the different pieces of ourselves to be strong, as we need each other and each other's battles for empowerment.

That surge of power you feel inside you now does not belong to me, nor to your parents, nor to your professors. That power lives inside of you. It is yours, you own it, and you will carry it out of this room. And whether you use it or whether you waste it, you are responsible for it. Good luck to you all. Together, in the conscious recognition of our differences, we can win, and we will.

A LUTA CONTINUA [The struggle continues].

[readingsquotes]

"You are inheriting a country that has grown hysterical with denial and contradiction. ...We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. Feel what that means. It is a reality that haunts each of our lives and that can help inform our dreams. It's not about altruism, it's about self-preservation. Survival."

Commencement Address: Audre Lorde

Oberlin College, May 29, 1989

[garadinervi]

Audre Lorde, Commencement Address: Oberlin College, May 29, 1989, in I Am Your Sister. Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, NY, 2009, pp. 213-218 (text here) [Solidarity with Palestine – A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List, Black Women Radicals]

[mogulgrind9]

Black History Facts: 02/13/23

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Educator and abolitionist Lucy Stanton was the first Black woman to graduate from college. She completed a ladies' literary program and graduated from Oberlin College in 1850. Her commencement speech was an appeal for anti-slavery.

[schoolofseasonshq]

Sorting

"Attention everyone, the sorting has commenced...please give us a moment, and allow the book to speak." Came a voice, as the lights in the hall dimmed. Standing there, was the Headmaster, the God Loki his green cloak billowing behind him. He summoned the book, and opened.

"I, am your headmaster...Loki, now when the book calls out your name, you will be sorted into each of your houses. Some of you will be in these houses permanently, others will change. It all depends on the choices you make, and on what the book tells of your future. The future however, is not set in stone...and whatever paths you may or may not take will determine the outcome, but this...is only the beginning of your story." Said the Headmaster, "There are four houses named after the four seasons. Spring for those whose futures are neutral, Summer for those who are good, Autumn for those who are undecided, and finally Winter.....for the evil among us."

"You mean the people who know how to have a good time." Says Harley with a laugh.

"In any case, never forget that your ending...is what you make it." Said Loki, before stepping aside. The book called each name, assigning each student to their houses.

House Spring

Lily K., Daughter of Alice

Beatrix. Daughter of Dionysus

Rosemary, Daughter of Jack Sparrow

Lily A., Daughter of Archie and Veronica

Jace, Son of Buffy Summers

Astrid, Daughter of Skwisgaar Skwigelf

June, Daughter of Daria Morgendorffer

Katie, Daughter of James Norrington and Scarlett the Redhead

Sarah, Daughter of Sarah Sanderson

Miranda, Daughter of Drak Jr.

Edward, Son of Chuck and Blair Bass

House Summer

Aziz, Son of Aladdin and Jasmine

Charity, Daughter of Edmund Pevensie

Leonard Son of Sheldon Cooper and Amy Farrah Fowler

Lana, Daughter of Carlisle and Esme

Chad, Son of Cinderella and Prince Charming

Julie, Daughter of Donatello (2003)

Jake, Son of Michelangelo (2003)

Lucy, Daughter of Raphael (2003)

Buffy, Daughter of Shaggy

Ben, Son of Belle and Beast

Henry, Son of Belle and Beast

Hunter, son of Dean Winchester

Ruby, Daughter of Rapunzel and Eugene

Audrey, Daughter of Aurora and Philip

Blossom, Daughter of Steven and Connie Universe

Hope, Daughter of Emma Swan and Killian Jones

Sierra, Daughter of snow White and Florian

House Autumn

Cora, Daughter of the Queen of Hearts

Mason, Son of Madam Mim

Lance, Son of Leonardo (2003)

Chanel, Daughter of Chanel Oberlin

Annabelle, Daughter of Gaston

Emily, Daughter of Max and Allison Dennison

Kayla, Daughter of the White Queen/Duchess of Spades

Hakon, Son of Hans

Miranda, Daughter of Drak Jr

House Winter

Haylie, Daughter of Hades

Raphael, Son of Frollo

Hala, Daughter of Jafar

Draco, Son of Maleficent

Dominic, Son of Chernabog

Ianthe, Daughter of Poison Ivy/Pamela Isley

Ava, Daughter of Mammon

Faith, Daughter of Dr. Facilier

Alexis, Daughter of Chernabog

Zachary, Son of Chernabog

Maddy, Grandaughter of Madam Mim

Mal, Daughter of Maleficent

[capocefalo]

Audre Lorde on Palestine, commencement address at Oberlin College in 1989.

[lezexplorer]

Lucy Stanton, an educator and abolitionist, was the first Black woman to graduate from Oberlin College in 1850. She completed a woman’s literary program and her commencement speech was an appeal to for anti-slavery.

[oberlincollegearchives]

If you have been waiting for the answer to our trivia question last week, here it is!

This is Archbishop Desmond Tutu giving the commencement address at Oberlin, 1987. His address, almost fittingly, came right before Oberlin College decided to divest in companies from South Africa due to Apartheid.

[oberlinadmissions]

Congratulations Oberlin Class of 2019!

 Via Oberlin College Flickr  

[oberlincollegelibraries]

Portrait collection expanding

The windows of the north reading area of the Science Library have long been accented by portraits of three notable alumni who grew up in Oberlin and had long, successful careers in science and industry.  Their portraits are in the center of the above photo:  Albert Allen Wright, Charles Martin Hall, and Lynds Jones.  These men have finally been joined by two alumnae, prominent  women whose leadership and scientific achievements have been lauded. 

Portraits of Joanne Chory '77 (left, photo courtesy of Salk Institute of Biological Sciences) and June Osborn ‘57  (right, photo courtesy of Ellen Levy) now flank the three men.  Both women received honorary degrees from Oberlin College; Chory was honored in 2019, barely a month after delivering the highly acclaimed TED Talk, “How supercharged plants could slow climate change.” Osborn delivered the commencement address when she received her honorary degree in 1993, the same year the National Commission on AIDS, which she chaired, presented their final report to the President and Congress.  Entitled AIDS: An Expanding Tragedy, the text of the report can be downloaded on Google Books.  An interview with Osborn, “What can we learn from the AIDS crisis?” was recently published in the Oberlin Alumni Magazine.

 We are honored to display their portraits in the Science Library and to celebrate their remarkable achievements. More portraits of notable Oberlin women in science are coming!

[oberlin-alumni]

Everything you need to know about Commencement/Reunion Weekend is available on the new ObieCRW app, designed by Guidebook. Download the app. 

[a-wandering-fool]

A strange thing is being done to the SAT test.

Secret Socioeconomic ‘Adversity Score’ Being Assigned to SAT Test Takers — Disclosed Only To Colleges

This is also happening.

Colleges from New York to California Now Offer Funding and Services for Illegal Immigrants

Is it any wonder why the ship is sinking?

Vermont’s Green Mountain College Graduates Final Class

More Colleges Experiencing a Decrease in Enrollment

Keystone College Cutting Majors and Laying off Staff

Hampshire College is perfect example.

Struggling Hampshire College Launches Search for New President

Commencement Speaker at Hampshire College Focuses on ‘White-Supremacist Capitalism’

Gibson’s Bakery vs. Oberlin updates:

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College trial — It’s ‘make or break’ week

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College – Trial Day 7 — Damages Expert says Show Gibson’s The Money!

Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College – Trial Day 9 – “the business never came back”

Warren can’t save higher ed.

Op-Ed Calls Elizabeth Warren’s Free College Plan a Form of Vote Shopping

Elizabeth Warren Event at George Mason U. Draws Hundreds, but Not Many Students

We used to call this segregation.

More Than 75 Universities Now Hold Black-Only Graduation Ceremonies

Defying the narrative.

U. Pennsylvania Study Finds America is Less Racist Under Trump

You don’t say.

New Study Claims Democrats Over-Reported Stress After the 2016 Election

=================

A lot happened recently....

[madamlaydebug]

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987).

Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. Beloved was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, Morrison received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016 Morrison received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. Her parents moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and instilled a sense of heritage through telling traditional African American folktales. She read frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She became a Catholic at the age of 12 and received the baptismal name "Anthony", which later became the basis for her nickname "Toni".

In 1949 Morrison enrolled at Howard University. She graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English, and earned a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her Master's thesis was Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated. She taught English, first at Texas Southern University in Houston for two years, then at Howard for seven years. While teaching at Howard, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958. The couple had two children and divorced in 1964. After the breakup of her marriage, she began working as an editor in 1965 for a textbook publisher in Syracuse, going on two years later to Random House in New York City, where she became a senior trade-book editor. In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.

Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). She wrote it while raising two children and teaching at Howard.

In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved, inspired by the true story of runaway slave Margaret Garner, became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 black critics and writers protested the omission in a statement that was published in The New York Times on January 24, 1988. Not long afterwards, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.

Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later returned to Garner's life story in the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous 25 years. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Shortly afterward, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home.

In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations," began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.

Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."

In 2000, The Bluest Eye was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club.

In addition to her novels, Morrison has written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, aged 45. Morrison's novel Home, half-written when Slade died, is dedicated to him.

Her 11th novel, entitled God Help the Child, was published 2015.

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity." She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things." Critics, however, have referred to her body of work as exemplifying characteristics of "postmodern feminism" by "altering Euro-American dichotomies by rewriting a history written by mainstream historians" and by her usage of shifting narration in Beloved and Paradise.

Morrison taught English at two branches of the State University of New York and at Rutgers University: New Brunswick Campus. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Though based in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, Morrison did not regularly offer writing workshops to students after the late 1990s, a fact that earned her some criticism. Rather, she has conceived and developed the prestigious Princeton Atelier, a program that brings together talented students with critically acclaimed, world-famous artists. Together the students and the artists produce works of art that are presented to the public after a semester of collaboration. In her position at Princeton, Morrison used her insights to encourage not merely new and emerging writers, but artists working to develop new forms of art through interdisciplinary play and cooperation.

At its 1979 commencement ceremonies, Barnard College awarded her its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. Oxford University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in June 2005.

In November 2006, Morrison visited the Louvre Museum in Paris as the second in its "Grand Invité" program to guest-curate a month-long series of events across the arts on the theme of "The Foreigner's Home." Inspired by her curatorship, Morrison returned to Princeton in Fall 2008 to lead a small seminar, also entitled "The Foreigner's Home." Also that year, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years. She continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.

In May 2010, Morrison appeared at PEN World Voices for a conversation with Marlene van Niekerk and Kwame Anthony Appiah about South African literature, and specifically, van Niekerk's novel Agaat.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from Rutgers University during commencement where she delivered a speech of the "pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."

In March 2012, Morrison established a residency at Oberlin College. In addition to Home, Morrison also debuted another work in 2012: She worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on a new production inspired by William Shakespeare's Othello. The trio focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the summer of 2012.

She is currently a member of the editorial board of The Nation magazine.

In writing about the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, Morrison wrote that, since Whitewater, Bill Clinton had been mistreated because of his "Blackness":

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

The phrase "our first Black president" was adopted as a positive by Bill Clinton supporters. When the Congressional Black Caucus honored the former president at its dinner in Washington D.C. on September 29, 2001, for instance, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the chair, told the audience that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."

In the context of the 2008 Democratic Primary campaign, Morrison stated to Time magazine: "People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race." In the Democratic primary contest for the 2008 presidential race, Morrison endorsed Senator Barack Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, though expressing admiration and respect for the latter.

In April 2015, speaking of the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Walter Scott—three unarmed black men killed by white police officers—Morrison said "People keep saying, 'We need to have a conversation about race.' This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back. And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, 'Is it over?', I will say yes."

Toni Morrison was the subject of a film entitled Imagine – Toni Morrison Remembers, directed by Jill Nicholls and shown on BBC1 television on July 15, 2015, in which Morrison talked to Alan Yentob about her life and work.

Morrison's papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University. Morrison's decision to add her papers to Princeton instead of her alma mater Howard University was criticized by some within the historically black colleges and universities community.