The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Wallace Thurman

“Who in the hell wants to be serious?” “As I was saying,” Truman continued, “you can’t blame light Negroes for being prejudiced against dark ones. All of you know that white is the symbol of everything pure and good, whether that everything be concrete or abstract. Ivory Soap is advertised as being ninety-nine and some fraction per cent pure, and Ivory Soap is white. Moreover, virtue and virginity are always represented as being clothed in white garments. Then, too, the God we, or rather most Negroes worship is a patriarchal white man, seated on a white throne, in a spotless white Heaven, radiant with white streets and white-apparelled angels eating white honey and drinking white milk.” “Listen to the boy rave. Give him another drink,” Ray shouted, but Truman ignored him and went on, becoming more and more animated. “We are all living in a totally white world, where all standards are the standards of the white man, and where almost invariably what the white man does is right, and what the black man does is wrong, unless it is precedented by something a white man has done.” “Which,” Cora added scornfully, “makes it all right for light Negroes to discriminate against dark ones?”