They assume that white people not only know better what Negroes need than Negroes themselves, but that they are anxious to supply these needs.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “They assume that white people not only know better what Negroes need than Negroes themselves, but that they are anxious…”
Editor's note · Context
This quote highlights the misguided assumption that white people are inherently better suited to address the needs of Black individuals.
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With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
By 1830 slavery seemed hopelessly fastened on the South, and the slaves thoroughly cowed into submission.