Quotes

"I knew that not race alone, not color alone, but the daily values that give meaning to life stood between me and those white girls with whom I worked. Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets make them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible fofr them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs."
This is him commenting on the white girls that he worked with. Though it was different than in the South in the sense that the girls interacted with him like a normal human being and didnt disrespect him in the way that the southern white girls did, he still felt very apart from them because they had grown up without learning how to give themselves an identity, in turn are just looking for material things to make them happy. Wright uses the phrase "outward-looking," where he refers to himself as inward looking; he is introspective and analydical of himself and the actions he takes, whereas the girls are not. He refers to this as a different language... the two can never understand things on the same plane because they don't view themselves on the same plane as the other, even though there is no racism between them.