In the days following the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, for reasons which were initially more unconscious than conscious, I reread Toni Morrison’s 1988 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature” takes as its subject the “instances where and means by which [Afro-American culture] has shaped Western culture.” Morrison argues that within the canon of American literature, there are many authors and many texts that reveal the Afro-American influence on their own language and structure; there can be found, to use her phrase, a “ghost in the machine.” Many are the critics who would prefer to avoid any conversation about race in the American literary canon, says Morrison, but one text whose ghost it has been impossible to “keep under lock and key” is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
It may come as little surprise that Morrison deems Moby-Dick appropriate for serious discussion about race: from the Pequod’s multiracial crew, which includes a Native American, an African and a Pacific Islander, to the prolonged discourses on the whale’s whiteness, it is a novel with more conspicuous inclusion of race and racial difference than many of its peers in the nineteenth century. Morrison first draws on Michael Rogin’s scholarship to connect Melville’s writing with the political currents of his time: in 1851, Melville’s own father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, ruled in Massachusetts that the escaped enslaved man Thomas Sims could legally be returned to a slave state—which ruling would become known as the Fugitive Slave Act. Melville wrote the final chapters of Moby-Dick a mere few months after Shaw’s verdict. After setting the historical scene, Morrison turns her attention to Ahab and the whale.
What do they mean? The allegorical readings of Ahab’s monomaniacal quest are legion: it is an “allegory of the state in which Ahab is Calhoun, or Daniel Webster”; it is an allegory “of capitalism and corruption, God and man, the individual and fate, and most commonly, the single allegorical reading of the white whale is understood to be brute, indifferent Nature.” Morrison, however, proposes another reading:
…if the whale is more than blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine aggression, if it is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we can consider the possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology. And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis… Ahab, then, is navigating between an idea of civilization that he renounces and an idea of savagery he must annihilate, because the two cannot coexist. The former is based on the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is that the idea of savagery is not the missionary one: it is white racial ideology that is savage and if, indeed, a white, nineteenth-century American male took on not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions and their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, very desperate, and very doomed.
It is an ambitious reading, but one that the text supports. I will return to the idea of what Ahab has personally lost to ideology, but for now, let us consider the adjective that precedes the whale, which “strikes more panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood”. Morrison alights upon chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” as evidence for her reading, and observes that Melville’s narrator is at pains to talk about whiteness not merely as colour, but as concept, as abstraction: “Therefore… symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.” It is not hard to consent to Morrison’s point that the words “idealized significance” imply a search for something as abstract, as complex as the ideology of whiteness. One might also look at Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” as more evidence for her hypothesis. Ahab is indeed challenged for renouncing civilization by his chief mate Starbuck, who decries his motivations as both financially and spiritually perverse: “How many barrels will thy vengeance yield the even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab?”; “To be enraged with a dumb thing… seems blasphemous.” Might not one who tried to name whiteness as ideology in 1851 be accused of going against God, and good financial sense? Whales, after all, power the Pequod in an almost literal sense; in Chapter 96, “The Try-Works”, the harpooners manning the works could just as easily be the crew of a steam ship as a sailing vessel: “the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat her round on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages and laden with fire, and burning a corpse… plung[ed] into that blackness of darkness.” If Ahab is at war with an idea, that very idea also propels his vessel forward; it is, in a sense, what allows for him to exist at all. It is yet another instance of the terrible complexity Morrison identifies, the ghost in the machine at work. Moby-Dick becomes an exploration of “the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in [Melville’s] own time and country… the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology.”
Morrison’s interpretation of Moby-Dick, which occupies only a section of a long and wide-ranging lecture, was what I had been looking for after the shootings in Minneapolis. I was deeply moved by the fact that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were doing what they could to resist ICE, an organisation they believed was morally abhorrent. What does Morrison say about Melville’s whale? “If the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world.” Finally, Ahab loses his life; the struggle against white supremacy is fatal. In attempting to intervene in what they believed was the unlawful abduction of non-white people from their homes by masked armed men, Good and Pretti were fighting against white supremacy. Like Morrison’s Ahab, they paid the price with their lives. Unlike Morrison’s Ahab, however, their struggle was not a solitary one.
In the wake of their killings, thousands of protesters took to the streets in Minneapolis, and hundreds of acts of protest were organised across the country; the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, called on President Trump to remove federal immigration agents from his state; on February 13, the “border czar” Tom Homan announced the end of the immigration crackdown on Minneapolis and St. Paul. To the optimist, the nationwide reaction to these shootings suggests that the white supremacy of our time is not equal to what Morrison calls white supremacy in its “fullest manifestation,” i.e. chattel slavery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, we are less accustomed to seeing images that clearly and violently signify white supremacy, though in the cellphone footage from Minnesota we have seen two such images: men in combat fatigues and balaclavas firing bullets through a passenger window until it grinds to a halt; and similarly faceless men firing rounds into a lifeless body, prostrate on the ground. Precisely because we are less accustomed to such images, we feel this current manifestation of white supremacy to be unbearably vivid. The intensity of these images, like the whiteness of the whale, completely overpowers us; it “appalls us above all things.”
It was not only Good and Pretti’s acts of resistance, however, that made me think of Morrison’s comments on white supremacy, and Melville’s reckoning with it. As she articulates the cost of pursuing the leviathan for Ahab, she also observes that a cost is incurred for both the combatant of white supremacy and the perpetrator: “The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self.” Of the many questions I asked myself while reading about Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and Silverio Villegas González, shot dead by ICE officers in Franklin Park, Chicago on September 12, 2025, and Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy taken and detained in Columbia Heights, Minneapolis on January 20 of this year, I returned to one in particular: Who are these agents? Who are these men and women holding the guns and leading the children away?
It is a question that appears in similar form in Morrison’s Beloved, when Stamp Paid finds stuck to the underside of his skiff a “red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.” Immobilized by the shock of what he has seen, he sits down by a fence and says to himself, “What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?”
What is a white supremacist? What does it cost you to be one? It is an idea Morrison herself returned to throughout her career, perhaps most famously in her 1993 interview with Charlie Rose:
Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about their psyche. It’s a huge waste, and a corruption, and a distortion. It’s like it’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is. It feels crazy; it is crazy. And it has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people, possibly equal, as it does black people. The racist white person… doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, is also constructed, is also made, and also has some kind of serviceability. But if you take it away, if I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self, and what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself?
What did Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good, say to his family at dinner on the night of January 7? Ross joined the National Guard in 2001, which took him to Iraq for a tour of duty in 2004. After Iraq, he worked for Customs Border Protection (or CBP) in 2007, and was stationed in El Paso, Texas. He worked there until 2015, before joining ICE. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, described him as “a longtime ICE officer who has been serving his country his entire life.” How does Ross feel about that service? What is it like to spend your entire life in battle against a racial other?
Though Morrison imagines Ahab as white supremacy’s nemesis, she alludes to interpretations of him as allegory for John C. Calhoun. I suspect the interpretation she has in mind is primarily that put forth by the scholar Alan Heimert in 1963 essay, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” Heimert’s case is very compelling, and argued at much greater length than Morrison’s own hypothesis. He notes that contemporaries of Calhoun saw in him an incandescent quality, with eyes that seemed to “give out light in the dark,” that “in repose glow[ed] with a steady light, in action fairly emitting flashes of fire.” Descriptions of his incandescence had as much to do with Calhoun’s mind as his body. During his final appearances in the congressional debates of 1850, many were struck by the contrast between his rapidly deteriorating physical health and his mental power:
I witnessed with astonishment the influence of his mighty mind over his weak physical structure. . . . [His] mind moved on, and as if insensible of the decay of bodily strength, put forth without stint his unequalled powers of thought and analysis, until nature well-nigh sunk under the imposition. His intellect preserved its vigor, while the body was sinking to decay. The menstruum retained all its powers of solution, while the frail crucible which contained it was crumbling to atoms.
All of this recalls Ahab of the “fiery eyes”, who “looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has over-runningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them”; who possesses “ an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance”; whose eyes, on the final day of the chase after Moby-Dick, are described as “glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin.” If Ishmael’s description of Ahab is not enough to evoke America’s most notorious racist, Ahab’s own words surely are. In Chapter 119, “The Candles,” he stands before his terrified crew in the midst of a lightning storm, manically orating:
“The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. […] but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or no? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I glory in my genealogy.”
From the incandescent and infernal imagery, to Ahab’s staging himself before his crew, to the contrast between his weakened body and his electrified mind, to the racial connotations of the word “genealogy,” it is Calhoun’s ghost, not in the ground one year, that one feels moving through the machine.
And yet Morrison was not quite satisfied with the idea that Ahab is an allegory for John C. Calhoun. Why not? In part for reasons I have already suggested, and others besides—for one thing, whatever “ship of the nation” an allegorical Calhoun would captain, its non-white crewmen would surely not all be free, wage-earning men. Yet I believe the two readings are not wholly incompatible: perhaps Morrison’s Ahab is a man who, like Calhoun, saw that the destiny of America as he knew it was inexorably bound to slavery and white supremacy, but who unlike Calhoun was content to let the America he knew destroy itself. At certain moments in the novel, the two interpretations seem to talk to each other: “What is it, what nameless inscrutable, unearthly thing is it,” wonders Ahab, “what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel remorseless emperor commands me… Is Ahab, Ahab?” Heimart might say that the “cruel remorseless emperor” is Calhoun’s political philosophy, his belief in the necessity of slavery; Morrison might call the “nameless inscrutable, earthly thing” Ahab’s prophetic ability to perceive whiteness as ideology.
I suspect what would interest Morrison about a reading of Ahab as Calhoun is the consideration of what he has lost to white supremacy. In Chapter 132, “The Symphony,” Ahab muses on everything he has been deprived of as captain of a whaling ship:
“Forty years of continual whaling! Forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! Forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years Ahab has forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horror of the deep! […] When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been… oh, weariness! heaviness! …the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey – more a demon than a man!”
However one may interpret Ahab and Moby-Dick, it is true to say that the whale has destroyed him long before he faces it for the final time. Whaling has been the focus, the essence of his life for forty years, has physically crippled him, and made him mad—to imagine Ahab without the whale is to imagine someone else entirely. If one is willing to accept that racism and white supremacy are forces acting on Ahab, then it is no great leap to accept that these forces have a distorting, deleterious and fragmentary effect on his psyche, no matter whether he is white supremacy’s avenger, or indeed “the only white American male heroic enough to slay the monster that was devouring the world.” It is the mercurial quality of Melville’s great creation, the multiplicities of interpretation Ahab can sustain, that evokes for me both Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the agents who killed them. If we live under white supremacy, whoever we are, whatever our relation to this ideology may be, we are irrevocably marked by it.
Morrison speaks elsewhere in her lecture of the “subliminal, underground” life of novels. Her articulation of the subliminal, subaqueous life of Moby-Dick has proved the most valuable means I have of making sense of the recent violence in the United States. More than maybe anything else, this was her project as a critic; she herself recognised that the connection between novels and the world, the author and history, the past and the present, was of great importance not only to Melville and the fractious union of the 1850s, but to her own time and place: “to question the very idea of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority… and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority… that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now.”
Ivan Kirwan-Taylor
Ivan Kirwan-Taylor is a writer based in London. He writes fiction, cultural criticism, and feature film screenplays.