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.
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.
When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.
No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
We can’t all work in the inner city. And, I don’t even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It’s just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.
People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.
Ever since I watched ‘Roots,’ I’ve dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
Diversity doesn’t mean black and white only.
The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.