Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism and emotional abuse.

Sweetness struggles with accepting and loving her daughter due to her dark skin color. Morrison explores colorism in the story as a symptom of white supremacy and presents Sweetness’s colorism as a result of her internalized racism and fearful desire to protect her daughter. The story begins with Sweetness describing her daughter as “so black she scared me” (Paragraph 1), immediately drawing attention to the relationship between colorism and her fear of anti-Black racism. In Sweetness’s internal dialogue, she describes her daughter as “too black” and “being born with that terrible color” (Paragraph 3), drawing attention to her internalized equation of Blackness and terror.

Some light-skinned Black characters, like Sweetness and her grandmother, were able to pass as white. Her grandmother, who passed as white, refused to accept her Blackness and rejected any contact from her children. Sweetness’s mother is presented as a foil for Sweetness’s grandmother because she decided not to pass and tells Sweetness about “the price she paid for that decision” (Paragraph 1): racial segregation (though with some light-skinned privilege) and demeaning treatment when working for a white family.