Raising a child into a world that calls him worthless is the Negro problem.

Evidence

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don’t know what “the Negro Problem” means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 332

Categorization

• XREF: Definitional counterpoint to ‘the lie’ — liberal claims of progress do nothing against the force telling a black child he has no right to be alive.