Wealth & Money Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison slices through the pious mask with a line that sounds like social commentary and indictment in the same breath. The target isn’t “unwed motherhood” as a moral category; it’s the selective outrage machine that pretends to defend family values while quietly defending hierarchy. By specifying “black or poor,” she exposes how stigma operates like a spotlight: it doesn’t illuminate behavior so much as it polices certain bodies. The same life circumstance reads as tragic, romantic, or merely private when it happens to women with race and class insulation. When it happens to women without that insulation, it becomes a public problem.

“The question is not morality, the question is money” turns what’s often framed as virtue into bookkeeping. Morrison is pointing at the moment when a private choice becomes a budget line: welfare, housing, healthcare, childcare. The outrage isn’t about sex; it’s about who is imagined to be paying for the consequences, and who is imagined to be receiving “undeserved” support. That’s why the final “we’re upset” lands like an accusation aimed at the collective: not individual prejudice alone, but a broader political economy of resentment.

The context is Morrison’s lifelong project of unmasking American innocence - the way the nation narrates itself as fair while outsourcing its discomfort to racialized stereotypes. She’s not pleading for sympathy; she’s refusing the premise. If the panic needs a scapegoat, she suggests, it’s already found one.