Daily Inspiration Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison lands the verb like a verdict: "became criminalized" refuses the comforting fiction that Black boys simply got labeled wrong. It points to an active social process, a conversion carried out by institutions that decide in advance what a body means. The line is deceptively plain, but it smuggles in an entire apparatus - policing, schooling, media, housing policy - that turns childhood into probable cause. "Became" is the knife twist: this was made, not natural.

Then she pivots to the intimate register: "I was in constant dread". Morrison, the master anatomist of interior life, uses maternal fear as political evidence. Dread isn't a headline; it's a daily weather system. The sentence structure mirrors it - short, declarative, unadorned - as if ornament would be obscene next to the stakes. When she says "for their lives", she collapses the distance between stereotype and mortality. Criminalization isn't just insult; it's pretext. A target isn't merely watched; it's meant to be hit.

"Targets everywhere" widens the map beyond any single incident. It implicates the banal spaces where Black boys move and are read: sidewalks, classrooms, stores, traffic stops. Morrison's final beat - "They still are" - is a moral time stamp. No catharsis, no narrative arc toward progress, just a continuum. Coming from a novelist who spent her career showing how history lives inside people, the intent is blunt: to make the reader feel how policy becomes atmosphere, how racism reproduces itself as anticipation, and how survival gets negotiated long before any crime could even exist.