Parenting & Family Quote by Toni Morrison

A line like this lands as both lament and indictment: a chant of “everywhere” that refuses the comfort of exceptions. Morrison isn’t romanticizing childhood; she’s pointing at a global pattern of adult power that treats children as simultaneously precious in rhetoric and disposable in practice. The repetition has the force of a witness statement, a refusal to let the reader mentally relocate the problem to “somewhere else.”

The subtext is about hierarchy. Children are the only class everyone passes through, yet they have the least recourse against coercion. Morrison’s phrasing, “scorned people of the earth,” smuggles in political vocabulary - “people” as a category deserving rights, dignity, and narrative attention. By framing children as a despised group, she aligns domestic life with the larger architectures of oppression she spent her career anatomizing: who gets believed, who gets protected, whose pain is treated as noise. Scorn isn’t just neglect; it’s contempt masquerading as discipline, the casual cruelty of not taking a child’s interior life seriously.

Context matters because Morrison’s novels are crowded with children navigating adult damage: abandoned, burdened, sexualized, recruited into the emotional economies of grown-ups. In her world, innocence isn’t an aura; it’s a vulnerability that others exploit. The line also reads as a rebuke to societies that sentimentalize “the future” while underfunding schools, normalizing violence, and treating children’s testimony as unreliable. Morrison turns that hypocrisy into a moral headline: the most defenseless population is routinely treated as least human.