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You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.
Negroes in this country—and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other—are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black.
But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me?
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
“I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?”
If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.
It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
