“It is always a job getting along with our friends and relatives. Establishing lasting and mutually rewarding relationships always calls for delicacy, sensitivity, and mainly suppression of the ego. One simply cannot say the first thing that comes to mind with no regard for the next person's ego problem. If I constantly say or do things that make the next person feel as if I am challenging his person, his capacity to reason, his standing as an individual, how can I ever hope to relate to him.
People the world over are not the same but those that we meet here in the U.S. are generally of a single type. By and large they are all fools, intellectual non-persons, emotional half-wits; status symbols, supervisory positions, and petty power motivate their every act. Personal, individual, financial success at any price is their social ethic, the only real standard upon which their conduct is built.
For us Blacks in particular this is a nightmare proposition. When this standard, this criterion for the measurement of individual merit and worth in this society is applied to us, measured against our standing or holdings, we cannot help but come out with a very low opinion of ourselves. From the womb to the tomb this plays in our minds. We are not worth more than the amount of capital we can raise. That is why you see Blacks pretending to be doing all right. That is why a Black man will buy a new car (status symbol) before he will buy food for his child or clothes for his wife.
And again with Blacks this whole thing goes even deeper. No man or group of men have been more denuded of their self-respect, none in history have been more terrorized, suppressed, repressed, and denied male expression than the U.S. Black.”
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