Discrimination in “the City”: Race, Class, and Gender in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Toni Morrison, the African American Nobel laureate author, explores the realities where African American women face multiple discriminations in her novel Jazz (1992). Following the qualitative method of the bibliographic study, this article examines the discriminations entailing race, class, and gender and presents Harlem as a discriminatory space in the novel. Jazz narrates the struggles of African American women who settled in Harlem in the early twentieth century. Haunted by the memories of slavery, the female African American characters in the novel find themselves subjugated in the society dominated by white Americans and also experience oppression within their black community. Harlem, denoted as “the City” in the novel, identifies itself as the relational space where black women experience the intersecting subjugation and alienation from their race, class, and gender positions.