"People sometimes ask me if I would not give anything to be white, I answer, in the words of the song, most emphatically, 'No.'  How do I know what I might be if I were a white man?  I might be a sand-hog, burrowing away and losing my health for $8 a day.  I might be a street-car conductor at $12 or $15 a week.  There is many a white man less fortunate and less well equipped than I am.  In fact, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man.  But I have often found it inconvenient - in America."