"I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people"
About this Quote
Morrison flips the usual script of racism-as-wound into racism-as-tell. The sting isn’t denied, but it’s relocated: the core damage belongs to the person doing the excluding. Calling racist insult “pitiable” is a devastating demotion. Pity is what you feel for someone cramped by their own smallness, not someone wielding power. In one move, she refuses to grant bigotry the prestige it craves - the authority to define the target.
The subtext is a survival strategy that’s also an aesthetic principle. “I never absorbed that” reads like a lesson in psychic boundaries: you can register hostility without letting it become internal narration. Morrison’s fiction is full of characters navigating a world eager to stamp meaning onto Black life; here she names the counter-move. Don’t metabolize someone else’s sickness as self-knowledge.
Context matters: Morrison came of age under Jim Crow’s long shadow and wrote through the supposedly “post-racial” decades when polite America kept inventing new costumes for the same hierarchy. Her stance isn’t naive optimism; it’s moral clarity sharpened by experience. “Deficient” is deliberately clinical, as if diagnosing an impairment: racism is not an opinion, it’s a failure of imagination and humanity, a dependency on an invented superiority. The line also gestures toward her larger project: reclaiming narrative authority. If racism is a deficiency in the racist, then Blackness isn’t the problem to be explained - it’s the racist’s interior poverty that needs accounting.
The subtext is a survival strategy that’s also an aesthetic principle. “I never absorbed that” reads like a lesson in psychic boundaries: you can register hostility without letting it become internal narration. Morrison’s fiction is full of characters navigating a world eager to stamp meaning onto Black life; here she names the counter-move. Don’t metabolize someone else’s sickness as self-knowledge.
Context matters: Morrison came of age under Jim Crow’s long shadow and wrote through the supposedly “post-racial” decades when polite America kept inventing new costumes for the same hierarchy. Her stance isn’t naive optimism; it’s moral clarity sharpened by experience. “Deficient” is deliberately clinical, as if diagnosing an impairment: racism is not an opinion, it’s a failure of imagination and humanity, a dependency on an invented superiority. The line also gestures toward her larger project: reclaiming narrative authority. If racism is a deficiency in the racist, then Blackness isn’t the problem to be explained - it’s the racist’s interior poverty that needs accounting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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