Wealth & Money Quote by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s line is a corrective aimed at the country’s favorite trick: treating Black life as a “special interest” rather than the load-bearing structure of American reality. The bluntness is the point. By stacking the big civic pillars - education, the economy, city planning, social policy - she refuses the comforting fiction that race is a side issue, something you can tack on after the “real” work of governance is done. Morrison is saying the opposite: if you want to understand what counts as “consequence” in the United States, follow where Black people have been positioned, moved, extracted from, and legislated against.

The subtext is about design, not accident. Schools are funded the way they are because neighborhoods were drawn the way they were; neighborhoods look the way they do because of redlining, highway placement, disinvestment, policing strategy. Even “neutral” economic policy - interest rates, labor markets, welfare rules - has always been filtered through decisions about whose vulnerability is tolerable and whose mobility is threatening. Morrison’s sentence collapses the alibis. You cannot talk about public goods without talking about who has historically been denied them, or about how exclusion quietly becomes “common sense.”

Context matters: Morrison wrote and spoke amid the post-civil rights era’s insistence on colorblindness, when institutions learned to keep outcomes racially lopsided while washing their hands rhetorically clean. Her insistence is not only moral; it’s diagnostic. Ignore Black people and you’re not being “objective.” You’re missing the blueprint.