The whitewashing of African American culture exposed in the Song of Songs White culture prefers to keep African American culture at a distance and mold it into what white culture believes it should be rather than to accept the enrichment offered by African-American culture. This may be due to white culture's fear of anything and anyone who looks obviously different. However, it is not enough for the dominant culture to separate itself from African American culture, it must shape and mold that culture into the stereotype projected onto the minority culture. African American culture is shaped by white/dominant culture, among other things, through white culture's use of fear within the minority group, the bestowal or withholding of innovations and wealth, and the control of the mobility of African American. The dominant white culture uses fear to shape and control people and cultures different from them. In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the fear evoked by the dominant white culture comes from the thought of being lynched and beaten by any white person who might take offense at the presence or actions of an African American. While this is not an obvious, overlapping theme in the novel, it is nevertheless present in the existence of the Seven Days as a black response to the lynchings and murders of African Americans by whites, as Guitar said, "'when a Negro child, A Negro woman , or a Negro man, is killed by the whites and their law and their courts do nothing about it, this society selects a similar victim at random and they execute him in a similar way if they can" (154). lynching or physical pain kept African Americans in limited roles and geogra...... center of paper ......ted:Bjork, Patrick Bryce. The novels of Toni Morrison: the search for self and place in community. New York: P. Lang, 1996. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Visions: Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1990. Ellis, Kate. "Text and Subtext: Myth and Politics in Toni Morrison's Song of Songs." LIT: Theory of literary interpretation. 6.1-2 (1995): 35-45.Furhman, Fiction by Jan. Toni Morrison. South Carolina: U of South Carolina P, 1996. Middleton, David. The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland, 1997. Morrison, Toni. Song of Songs. New York: The Penguin Group, 1977. Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.Rice, Herbert William. Toni Morrison and the American tradition: a rhetorical reading. New York: P. Lang, 1996.