Carolina QuotesWe too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.
Anna J. Cooper Carolinian
Source
p. 29
- work
- A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892)
- year
- 1892
- locator
- p. 29
Cite this record
“We too often mistake individuals’ honor for race development…” Anna J. Cooper. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-0C8703DF4F. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/0c8703df4f
More from Anna J. Cooper
A boy, however meager his equipment and shallow his pretentions, had only to declare a floating intention to study theology and he could get all the support, encouragement and stimulus he needed, be absolved from work and invested beforehand with all the dignity of his far away office. While a self-supporting girl had to struggle on by teaching in the summer and working after school hours to keep up with her board bills, and actually to fight her way against positive discouragements to the higher education; till one such girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates.”
Whence this sneaking admiration we all have for bullies and prize-fighters? Whence the self-congratulation of “dominant” races, as if “dominant” meant “righteous” and carried with it a title to inherit the earth? Whence the scorn of so-called weak or unwarlike races and individuals, and the very comfortable assurance that it is their manifest destiny to be wiped out as vermin before this advancing civilization? As if the possession of the Christian graces of meekness, non-resistance and forgiveness, were incompatible with a civilization professedly based on Christianity, the religion of love!
To me, faith means treating the truth as true.