"Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader"
About this Quote
Leadership, for Toni Morrison, is less a crown than a burden you either pick up or kick down the road. "Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader" sounds almost plainspoken, but the pressure is in the verb: take. Leadership isn’t granted by charisma or appointment; it’s an act of will, a decision to be accountable when it would be easier to stay safely unmarked.
Morrison’s work is crowded with communities damaged by abandonment and by the seductive lie that power belongs to someone else: the state, the school, the patriarch, the "respectable" class. Her novels map what happens when responsibility is outsourced. The cost isn’t abstract; it’s intimate: children unprotected, histories erased, people forced to improvise survival in the vacuum where guidance should have been. In that light, the line reads like a rebuke of passivity dressed up as humility. Waiting for the perfect leader is often a way to avoid becoming one.
The subtext also challenges the romance of leadership as lone heroism. "Somebody" is deliberately unspecific, even a little blunt. It implies rotation, not royalty: if leadership is necessary labor, then it’s labor that can be shared, taught, and demanded. Morrison’s broader cultural context - Black intellectual life, post-civil rights backlash, the continual rebranding of inequality - makes the statement feel like civic emergency advice. When institutions won’t protect you, responsibility becomes a form of self-defense.
Morrison’s work is crowded with communities damaged by abandonment and by the seductive lie that power belongs to someone else: the state, the school, the patriarch, the "respectable" class. Her novels map what happens when responsibility is outsourced. The cost isn’t abstract; it’s intimate: children unprotected, histories erased, people forced to improvise survival in the vacuum where guidance should have been. In that light, the line reads like a rebuke of passivity dressed up as humility. Waiting for the perfect leader is often a way to avoid becoming one.
The subtext also challenges the romance of leadership as lone heroism. "Somebody" is deliberately unspecific, even a little blunt. It implies rotation, not royalty: if leadership is necessary labor, then it’s labor that can be shared, taught, and demanded. Morrison’s broader cultural context - Black intellectual life, post-civil rights backlash, the continual rebranding of inequality - makes the statement feel like civic emergency advice. When institutions won’t protect you, responsibility becomes a form of self-defense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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