Throughout his readings of these narratives, Morrison critiques a metaphysics of color that he locates in these writers and in the U.S. literary canon that has traditionally been discussed as raceless and apolitical. Morrison claims that critics' attempts to remove politics and race from intellectual and artistic discussions have cost literature energy and life, and that such attempts to remove these crucial issues from discussion are, in fact, racist and political acts. In the first chapter of Playing in the Dark, Morrison argues that a black presence pervades the United States and is crucial to shaping its national identity and developing national literature. Indeed, the real black body or even imaginary Africanisms – he hypothesizes – could be the field in which, and very often against which, characteristics (individualism, morality, innocence, among others) typically associated with US literature as well as they were built with the same “Americanness”. In this first section of her book, Toni Morrison shifts the emphasis of the discussion of race from the impact on those who suffer from racialized narratives – literary, social, cultural, and political – to an emphasis on the impact of race.