Independent Lens

I can't be a pessimist... because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I'm forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But... The Negro in this country... The future of the Negro in this country... is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they maligned so long. What white people have to do is try to find out, in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need him. And the question you got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro, there is no difference between the North and the South. There's just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I'm not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it's able to ask that question.