Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/174

 radiant with white streets and white-apparelled angels eating white honey and drinking white milk.”

“Listen to the boy rave. Give him another drink,” Ray shouted, but Truman ignored him and went on, becoming more and more animated.

“We are all living in a totally white world, where all standards are the standards of the white man, and where almost invariably what the white man does is right, and what the black man does is wrong, unless it is precedented by something a white man has done.”

“Which,” Cora added scornfully, “makes it all right for light Negroes to discriminate against dark ones?”

“Not at all,” Truman objected. “It merely explains, not justifies, the evil—or rather, the fact of intraracial segregation. Mulattoes have always been accorded more consideration by white people than their darker brethren. They were made to feel superior even during slave days made to feel proud, as Bud Fisher would say, that they were bastards. It was for the mulatto offspring of white masters and Negro slaves that the first schools for Negroes were organized, and say what you will, it is generally the Negro with a quantity of mixed blood in his veins who finds adaptation to a Nordic environment more easy than one of pure blood, which, of course, you