Toni Morrison’s interplay between racial stereotypes and racial ambiguity throughout “Recitatif” highlights the governing cultural binary in society. The story demands recognition of race-based identification of its two protagonists, by blurring the color lines Morrison is able to emphasize the complexities in the social stratification of race and our intrinsic participation in it. Twyla, the story’s narrator through her subtlety, enables the indistinct narrative. It is established that the two girls are of two different races, “we looked like salt and pepper” (160), but the race of either girl is never distinguished. Morrison describes the story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different
