Parenting & Family Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s line reads like a small act of linguistic self-defense: if the world insists on splitting identity into manageable categories, she insists on welding them back together. “Black” and “feminist” aren’t fused for branding; they’re fused because her lived evidence wouldn’t allow a clean separation. The women around her weren’t debating whether sexism or racism was the bigger problem. They were doing the work of survival in a country that made that work invisible unless it could be romanticized as “strength.”

The key verb is “merged.” Morrison frames identity not as an inheritance but as craft, a deliberate refusal of the either/or logic that often haunted both mainstream feminism (too white, too middle-class) and Black political life (too frequently organized around men’s leadership and women’s labor). Her “surrounded by” is doing quiet rhetorical work, too: feminism here isn’t imported theory, it’s environmental reality. The tough Black women aren’t exceptional superheroes; they’re the baseline. That’s what stings. If toughness is assumed, then exhaustion is privatized, and the costs never count as political.

There’s also a subtle critique of the sentimental myth that Black women “can handle anything.” Morrison honors competence while hinting at its trap: when society expects you to manage homes, rear children, and work outside it, resilience becomes a requirement, not a choice. By naming the merger, she makes that unchosen workload legible as ideology - and turns experience into a vocabulary that can finally argue back.