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The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro.
The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the
people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.
The Negro came to the white man for a roof or for five dollars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love.
It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reëxamined.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
