I Want The World To Recognize With

Certain Things Need To Be Said If One Is To Avoid Falsifying The Problem.

What I Call Middle-class Society Is Any Society That Becomes Rigidified In Predetermined Forms, Forbidding All Evolution, All Gains, All Progress, All Discovery. I Call Middle-class A Closed Society In Which Life Has No Taste, In Which The Air Is Tainted, In Which Ideas And Men Are Corrupt. And I Think That A Man Who Takes A Stand Against This Death Is In A Sense A Revolutionary.

Every Colonized People-in Other Words, Every People In Whose Soul An Inferiority Complex Has Been Created By The Death And Burial Of Its Local Cultural Originality-finds Itself Face To Face With The Language Of The Civilizing Nation; That Is, With The Culture Of The Mother Country. The Colonized Is Elevated Above His Jungle Status In Proportion To His Adoption Of The Mother Country's Cultural Standards.

I Am Black; I Am In Total Fusion With The World, In Sympathetic Affinity With The Earth, Losing My Id In The Heart Of The Cosmos -- And The White Man, However Intelligent He May Be, Is Incapable Of Understanding Louis Armstrong Or Songs From The Congo. I Am Black, Not Because Of A Curse, But Because My Skin Has Been Able To Capture All The Cosmic Effluvia. I Am Truly A Drop Of Sun Under The Earth.

For Europe, For Ourselves And For Humanity, Comrades, We Must Turn Over A New Leaf, We Must Work Out New Concepts, And Try To Set Afoot A New Man.