Status Updates From A Long Way from Home (Liber...

“Some folk’s remedy for lost love is immediately to love again. But if it is a big love, that remedy is like swilling beer to get rid of a champagne hangover. For if one has a passionate love in his system, I don’t think indulging in lesser and indiscriminate loving helps to rid one of it. My way is to face it and live it down in hard work, sweat it out of my system”

“I thought it would be a new experience to meet a white who was subtly patronizing to a black; the majority of them were so naively crude about it”

“When bad traits are wished upon a whole group of people, it isn’t so surprising if the best of us sometimes unconsciously exhibit some of the worst traits”

"I felt that America also could gain something from its youngsters circulating abroad and mingling with foreigners on their own ground. Certainly, whatever they were before, they could not be worse Americans after that experience."

(Color consciousness)...was something with which my white fellow expatriates could sympathize but which they could not altogether understand. For they were not black like me. Not being black and unable to see deep into the profundity of blackness, some even thought that I might have preferred to be white like them. They couldn’t imagine that I had no desire merely to exchange my black problem for their white problem

“I did not come to the knowing of Negro workers in an academic way, by talking to black crowds at meetings, nor in a bohemian way, by talking about them in cafes. I knew the unskilled Negro worker of the city by working with him as a porter and a longshoreman and as a waiter on the railroad….So when I came to write about the low down Negro, I did not have to compose him from an outside view”

“Youth is all right when guided and led by older heads. They act more from enthusiasm than from thinking and will rush headlong into anything when they are excited, for youth is the time of excitement”

“(Discrimination) is a cancer in the universal human body and poison to the individual soul. It saps the sentiment upon which friendliness and love are built. Ultimately it can destroy even the most devoted friendship…no white person, however sympathetic, can fully feel the corroding bitterness of color discrimination. Only the black victim can

“I think the Anglo-Saxon mind becomes morbid when it turns on the sex life of colored people. Perhaps a psychologist might be able to explain why”

“I had a desire to be away from my fellows and off by myself, even if it were in a crowd”
You and me both Claude