Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Franklin Frazier

A chill rides inside Frazier's wording because "new race" sounds like biology while doing the work of politics. As a sociologist writing in an America obsessed with classification, he borrows the era's racial grammar only to suggest something more volatile than blood: a collective identity becoming self-conscious. "Has awakened" is the tell. It implies a prior state of forced sleep, a long sedation produced by Jim Crow, economic dependency, and the paternalistic expectation that Black life should remain legible, grateful, and contained.

The line lands in the mid-20th-century moment when Black Americans were moving, organizing, and arguing in public about dignity as much as rights: the Great Migration reshaping cities, wartime rhetoric about democracy clashing with segregation, early civil rights mobilization, and the internal debate Frazier was famous for stoking about class, family structure, and the Black middle class. He isn't simply announcing resistance; he's framing it as a historical rupture. "Faces" turns the sentence outward, making white America the audience and the defendant. The country is being told it will have to deal with consequences it preferred to treat as background.

There's subtextual provocation, too: calling it a "new race" pokes at the fiction that race is static and natural. If a "race" can awaken, it can change; if it can change, the old order isn't destiny, it's design. Frazier compresses sociology into a warning label: identity is being forged under pressure, and once people see the system clearly, they stop cooperating with it.