“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”

—  Ralph Ellison

"Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1955), p. 104.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white an…" by Ralph Ellison?
Ralph Ellison photo
Ralph Ellison 82
American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer 1914–1994

Related quotes

“It is important to make a further distinction here among black hatred, black racism, and Black Power. Black hatred is the black man's strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it…. But the charge of black racism cannot be reconciled with the facts. While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism. Racism, according to Webster, is 'the assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another, which is usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its rights to dominance over others.' Where are the examples among blacks in which they sought to assert their right to dominance over others because of a belief in black superiority?… Black Power is an affirmation of the humanity of blacks in spite of white racism. It says that only blacks really know the extent of white oppression, and thus only blacks are prepared to risk all to be free.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 14-16

“Black Power seeks not understanding but conflict; addresses blacks and not whites; seeks to develop black support, but not white good will.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 16

Ronald Reagan photo

“Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others — white and black — preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Address on the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King (15 January 1983) http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/11583d.htm
1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)
Context: Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others — white and black — preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence. We can be so thankful that Dr. King raised his mighty eloquence for love and hope rather than for hostility and bitterness. He took the tension he found in our nation, a tension of injustice, and channeled it for the good of America and all her people.

Markus Zusak photo

“At first, all is black and white.
Black on white.
That's where I'm walking, through pages.
These pages.
Sometimes it gets so that I have one foot in the pages and the words, and the other in what they speak of.”

Markus Zusak (1975) Australian author

Source: Underdog

Owen Lovejoy photo

“If the Bible sanctions slavery at all, it is the enslavement of white men. No one pretends that the servants spoken of in the Bible were blacks. The Roman slave was not a black man, the Hebrew slave was not a black man. The question is, whether the laboring man, white or black, may rightfully be enslaved.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA170 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 170
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that dies not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

As quoted in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
1960s

“The world is not that black and white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. It is complex.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Nahum Rabinovitch photo

“The white woman must cohabit with members of the dark races, white men with black women. Thus the white race will disappear, for the mixing of the dark with white means the end of the white man, and our most dangerous enemy will become only a memory.”

Nahum Rabinovitch (1928–2020) Israeli rabbi

originally attributed in 1952 to an "Emanuel" Rabinovitch, who appears to be a fictional creation of Eustace Mullins
Misattributed

James Baldwin photo

“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
Karl Marx photo

“Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 7, pg. 329.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)
Source: Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest
Context: In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

Related topics