Wealth & Money Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s genius here is the way she flips the national morality play. The usual script says some people “earn” and others “get handouts.” She scrambles that binary with a quiet, devastating provocation: everybody gets something handed to them. The shock isn’t in accusing the rich of inheriting money; it’s in widening “inheritance” into a cultural delivery system - favors, introductions, benefit-of-the-doubt, the soft landing you don’t notice because you’ve never hit the ground.

The line “I don’t mean just inheritance of money” is doing surgical work. It anticipates the listener’s defensive retreat (“I didn’t get a trust fund”) and cuts it off. Morrison names the more socially acceptable kind of redistribution: nepotism, the old-boy network, the casual referral that becomes a career. By calling these “what people take for granted,” she targets not only the mechanism but the blindness that protects it. Privilege’s most reliable camouflage is normalcy.

Context matters: Morrison wrote and spoke from inside an America that romanticizes meritocracy while quietly running on relationships, legacy admissions, and racialized access to institutions. As a Black woman who navigated elite publishing and academia, she understood that the gate isn’t only locked; it’s staffed. The intent isn’t to moralize envy. It’s to expose how “deserving” gets constructed after the fact, once someone has already been carried through the door by an invisible hand.