The book consists of three essays, with their names stylised in lowercase letters:[3] In Playing in the Dark, Morrison develops literary criticism of major white authors like Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ernest Hemingway, tracing the way their work dealt with and was shaped by their handling of the subject of blackness.

"[4] Reviewing Playing in the Dark in The New York Times in 1992, Wendy Steiner said: "The moral and emotional force of [Morrison's] explorations is apparent.

If the American identity is formed against this black shadow, it is a sign of abject weakness and a cause for shame....The genius of Ms. Morrison's approach is to enlist those very describers and imaginers—white men of letters—in an investigation that can end only in their self-indictment."

"[5] Michael Eric Dyson observes that in addition to this exploration of the "white literary imagination...Playing in the Dark is also about a black intellectual seizing the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism.

Blacks are usually represented through the lens of white perception rather than the other way around...With [Playing in the Dark], a substantial change is portended.