Throughout her readings of these stories, Morrison critiques a metaphysics of color that she locates in these writers and in the United States literary canon, traditionally considered raceless and apolitical. Morrison argues that critics' attempts to remove politics and race from intellectual and artistic discussions have cost literature its energy and life and that such attempts to remove these crucial issues from debate are, in fact, acts of racist and political. In the first chapter of Playing in the Dark, Morrison argues that a black presence is pervasive in the United States and that it is crucial in shaping its national identity as well as developing the national literature. Indeed, the real black body or even imaginary Africanisms – she speculates – could be the domain on which, and very often against which, characteristics (individualism, morality, innocence, among others) typically associated with the literature of United States as well as with “Americanness” itself were constructed. In this first section of her book, Toni Morrison shifts the focus of the debate on race from the impact on those who suffer as a result of racialized narratives – literary, social, cultural and political – to the focus on the impact of the breed.