Daily Inspiration Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s sentence refuses the soothing story that racial violence is a sudden eruption, committed by obvious villains in dark alleys. She starts with the blunt fact of harm - “an enormous amount of violence” - and then pivots to a colder accusation: violence is also bureaucratic, administered through institutions that can always claim clean hands. “None of those things can take place” is prosecutorial language. It treats violence not as an exception to civic life but as a product of it, something that requires permissions, budgets, indifference, and paperwork.

The key move is her use of “complicity.” She’s not only naming perpetrators; she’s widening the circle to include respectable managers: the people who “run the schools and the city.” Schools, in American mythology, are supposed to be escape hatches; Morrison flips them into sites where harm can be normalized through tracking, discipline, neglect, and the quiet routing of children toward diminished futures. “The city” stands in for the whole municipal apparatus - housing policy, policing, sanitation, transit, employment - the levers that decide whose neighborhoods get protection and whose get managed.

The subtext is moral, but also structural: if violence persists at scale, it’s because leadership has designed conditions where it can. Morrison’s intent isn’t to shock; it’s to remove plausible deniability. She’s insisting that power is not neutral, and that institutions don’t merely fail Black people - they actively participate when they tolerate predictable outcomes and call them unfortunate.