If you were poor and black, Mathematics attacked the idea that you were meant to be ignorant, uneducated, blind to the world around you. It exposed the lies that helped people treat your forefathers as animals. And it wasn’t until someone like the Father came to actively disseminate this information to poor black men—saying, “Hold on, your people are the fathers of civilization”—that people like me were set free. I can now say that if it wasn’t for Mathematics, I wouldn’t have achieved anything. I never would have imagined that a poor black motherfucker like me would grow up to respect the
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