American Young Adult literature has historically been, and remains, a field dominated by Western whiteness: white authors, white characters, white assumptions and perspectives of the world packaged as universal truths. As a whole the field is plagued by an unbearable whiteness that, for all its attempts to present a (neo)liberal take on the world, reproduces the systems of discrimination, patriarchy, ideological tyranny and repression that novels such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Divergent portend to take on.

Lois Lowry’s The Giver is no exception. The Giver, for all its emphasis on Western individualism, choice, and necessity of difference and struggle for enjoyable human life, still manages to perpetuate racism by invoking what Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination calls the “Africanist presence”:

These speculations [on the role of blackness and black bodies in American literature] have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature — individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of heaven and hell — are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, Africanist presence. It has occured to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the ways writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence — one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows. (“Black Matters,” Playing in the Dark, pp. 5-6, emphasis mine)

How does Jonas’ introduction to color and war reveal the Africanist presence Morrison warns us about? How does The Giver’s treatment of race (or the absence of treatment) correspond to more contemporary works of Young Adult fiction?