Daily Inspiration Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison drops “buffer” like a blunt object: not metaphor for metaphor’s sake, but a diagnostic term for how American power has managed conflict. A buffer absorbs impact so the main structures don’t have to. In her framing, Black people aren’t just oppressed; they’re strategically positioned between “powers” to keep the most dangerous collision from happening: poor and working people recognizing a shared enemy in concentrated wealth and political authority.

The line’s force is in its refusal to flatter anyone. It implicates institutions that built slavery and segregation, but it also indicts the recurring bargain offered to non-Black groups: proximity to whiteness, small advantages, or the emotional wage of feeling “above” someone, in exchange for siding with power. Morrison is pointing to an engineered social geometry where racial hierarchy is not a side effect of class politics but one of its key tools. “Prevent class war” is the tell: she’s describing race as a governing technology, a way to fracture solidarity before it forms.

Context matters. Across Morrison’s novels, “American” identity is haunted by what it disavows; whiteness is constructed not as a neutral norm but as a story requiring constant maintenance. This quote reads like the nonfiction spine beneath her fiction: a reminder that the country’s fiercest talent isn’t innocence, it’s management. Not just of labor, but of resentment, fear, and belonging.