We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human…”
Editor's note · Context
From "The Souls of Black Folk," this passage critiques the tendency of many Americans to prejudge issues concerning Black people without considering evidence.
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So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…