Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we’re true to ourselves.
The important thing for me as an educator is how to – how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don’t read texts or don’t read my texts.
The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher.
When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That’s not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.
And as a Christian, I got something the world didn’t give me, the world can’t take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.
The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.
Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
I don’t know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.
Poor people can be greedy, too. It’s just that they don’t have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions.
It’s just that the churches have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of people argue that the churches are even dead. I don’t believe they’re dead, but they’ve been sleeping, but they, I hope, will wake up, and that’s one of my tasks is to make sure they wake up as much as they do before I die.
The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things.
Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class.
Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That’s why we have to bear witness. That’s why we have to be so public about it, and that’s why we can’t just play footsie with it.
I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.
The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they’re on the road to freedom and that means they’re gonna run up against the powers that be.
If you view life as a gold rush, you’re going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I’ve never viewed them in any way as being separable.