Political Quotes

W.E.B. Du Bois: “Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!”

On the record
Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!
Said by
W.E.B. Du Bois

Editor's note · Context

He challenges the self-destructive nature of racial pride when it leads to internal conflict.

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More from W.E.B. Du Bois

Jan 1, 1903

Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.

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But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.

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The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.

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So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.

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