Politics & Power Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison is naming the ugly social glue that American whiteness has historically offered to European immigrants: not shared language, not shared ideals, but a ready-made membership card stamped with someone else’s humiliation. The line’s sting comes from its second-person intimacy - “that other immigrant” - collapsing the sentimental story of the hopeful newcomer into a darker, transactional bargain. You arrive with an accent and an uncertain place in the pecking order; you become “American” by learning who you’re allowed to look down on.

The phrasing “contempt for me” is doing double work. It’s personal, refusing the comfort of abstraction, but it also positions Morrison’s “me” as a stand-in for Blackness in the national imagination: a boundary marker against which newcomers can measure their ascent. When she says “it’s nothing else but color,” she’s stripping away the myth that assimilation is primarily cultural. The subtext is that America’s most efficient integration program has been racial: you can be poor, Catholic, Jewish, Eastern European, speaking broken English - but if you can be recruited into the project of anti-Blackness, you can be folded into “whiteness.”

The context sits in the long arc from late-19th/early-20th century immigration to post-civil rights America, where groups once treated as not-quite-white became white in practice through housing, labor, policing, and politics. Morrison’s intent isn’t to indict immigrants as uniquely wicked; it’s to expose the machinery. Contempt, here, isn’t an accident of prejudice. It’s the price of admission - and the nation’s most enduring counterfeit of solidarity.