The Talented Tenth Quotes

The state — or, to make matters more concrete, the government — consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting ‘A’ to satisfy ‘B’. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advanced auction on stolen goods.

Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure ’nough fool.

Anytime you get this many light-skinned black people together at least half of them are going to be folks who act light-skinned.

You misjudge us because you do not know us. —W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth

The Murchisons are honest-to-God-real-foe-rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I though everybody knew that.

The longer I live, the more boring youth becomes. So redundant. Each generation rediscovers the wheel of rebellion, the wheel of love, and so forth and so on. We hardly know which end is up until we’re in our thirties.

A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

U.S. Black women intellectuals are not a female segment of William E. B. DuBois's notion of the "talented tenth." One is neither born an intellectual nor does one become one by earning a degree. Rather, doing intellectual work of the sort envisioned within Black feminism requires a process of self-conscious struggle on behalf of Black women, regardless of the actual social location where that work occurs.

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them.

The last time he’d crossed Luxbridge, Dorian had only noticed the brilliance of the magic, sparkling, springy underfoot, coruscating in a thousand colors at every step. Now, he saw nothing but the building blocks to which the magic was anchored. Luxbridge’s mundane materials were not stone, metal, or wood; it was paved with human skulls in a path wide enough for three horses to pass abreast. New heads had been added to whatever holes had formed over the years. Any Vürdmeister, as masters of the vir were called after they passed the tenth shu’ra, could dispel the entire bridge with a word. Dorian even knew the spell, for all the good it did him. What made his stomach knot was that the magic of Luxbridge had been crafted so that magi, who used the Talent rather than the foul vir that meisters and Vürdmeisters used, would automatically be dropped

On balance, disruptive innovation is very positive. In an isolated environment, something is being done in a traditional way. Then innovative entrepreneurs come out and say, “Hey, you can do this much more efficiently for a fraction of the cost and with a tenth of the number of employees.” For customers, it’s fantastic. But there are people who are losing jobs, which is not great for them and potentially a burden for society. Over the long term, however, if you don’t have disruptive innovation, you will become a country or a market full of incumbents and will eventually be disrupted by somebody else, which would be very bad for you. So yes, on balance, disruptive innovation is good. Many people think of technological innovation and entrepreneurship as an American, and particularly a Silicon Valley, specialty. You’re an example of the global spread of tech entrepreneurship. Are you an exception, or are you the new rule? This is something I’m really excited about. One of the reasons I started Atomico eight years ago was to prove that Skype was not just the one exception where a global tech company was created outside of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was the first technology ecosystem created. It’s been around for over 50 years. And it is the most prolific location for creating successful technology businesses. But we did some research and looked at the last ten years in the Internet and software sector to see where the billion-dollar companies were coming from. What we found was that 40 percent of those companies came from Silicon Valley and 60 percent came from outside. My prediction would be that over the next ten years, Silicon Valley will account for less than 40 percent. [For a technology ecosystem to thrive,] you need to have people who are encour aging. You need to have role models. You need to have capital. And you need to have people who want to come and work for these entrepreneurs. That is starting to happen in more and more places. Obviously, China, with Beijing, is in second place. But Sweden is now third in the world in producing billion-dollar software and Internet companies over the last ten years. There’s no lack of talent in these other places, and technology education is very good all around. Ten or 15 years ago, if you wanted to be an Internet innovator or entrepreneur, you packed your bag and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley and made it over there. Today, you don’t need to do that. You can be equally successful in many other places around the world. This is an irreversible trend. I think you’re going to see more and more great entrepreneurs and great technology companies being created in other places.

That such people could accomodate conflicting worldly labels... was a talent of postcolonial life, evidence of adaptation by people who have had many different categories foisted on them by outsiders.

She’d once asked a black psychologist whose house she’d cleaned on Long Island about black people’s attachment to clothes. She’d told Blanche it probably was partly due to African peoples’ belief in body adornment in a spiritual way, and partly because, consciously or unconsciously, black people in America hoped clothes would make them acceptable to people who hated them no matter what they wore.

Using education as a tool of division has a distinct history in Black society. W.E.B. Du Bois highly publicized “the talented tenth” principle, a belief that the top 10 percent of Black intellectuals would lead the other 90 percent out of oppression. Although division of people through intelligence isn’t exclusive to the Black community, it has much different connotations when you know that white folks, regardless of where they fall in school, can achieve. Donald Trump went from a reality TV star to being president of the United States. There will always be a different set of standards for us.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life.

And then there was Dara, the most talented one of us all, swimming on the “B” relay team, in early heats, battling it out with — and often losing to — girls who may have had two arms but didn’t have one-tenth her strength and skill. If I’d been her, I would’ve wanted to get as far away from swimming as possible. But she clung to it as if it were all there was in the world. And maybe for her, it was. And the thing was, she was still good — not the best, but better than many, even if she was technically handicapped.

Months after the release of Du Bois’s Darkwater, Mamie Robinson brought out the first recording of the great antiracist art form of the 1920s. “Crazy Blues” became a best seller. Record companies capitalized on the blues craze among Black and White listeners alike. Robinson, “Ma” Rainey, Ida Cox, and Bessie Smith sang about Black women as depressed and happy, as settling down and running around, as hating and loving men, as gullible and manipulative, as sexually free and sexually conforming, as assertive and passive, as migrating and staying, as angels and as “Wild Women.” Blueswomen and their male counterparts embraced African American cultural ways, despised the strategy of trying to persuade Whites that Blacks were okay, and were therefore despised by Talented Tenth assimilationists.

Sometimes it’s hard being dark-skinned, just like it’s sometimes hard to be any shade of brown or yellow. But it’s not awful. We’re just as cute and wonderful as anyone else.

Today’s national movements, women’s and blacks’, seem more interested in being players in the white male club than challenging the white male patriarchy.

The morning sunlight lay in slivers on the bedroom floor, cut to ribbons by the bamboo blind.