We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.
Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
The African American’s relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
If you don’t tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It’s important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.
There haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America. There’s been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I think literacy is everything.
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by ‘Africa,’ by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.
I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
If Martin Luther King came back, he’d say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
The Dominican Republic says ‘We’re black behind the ears.’ And in Mexico, ‘there’s a black grandma in the closet.’ They know, they’ve just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.
It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.
It’s not white versus black any more, it’s haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands.
Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.
So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be ‘blackish’ – really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.
A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that’s basically where I am.
No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.