Heritage

"Again I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know, Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them they’d go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense."
--Richard Wright, "Journals, 1945 - 1947"