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Anyone who gives you food is also giving you love.
The words don’t just run off my back; the pain doesn’t pass. I’m not aware of it, but in responding with silence, I allow the opinions of those around me to become reality—and I aim my hatred inward.
Rap music radiates an attitude of you may trample us down, but you can never shut us up. It lights the same fire within me. I’m not going to fucking be quiet either. Above all, it’s the words that draw me in, deeper than any other music has done before.
I don’t know what comes first: Do I fall in love with the color of my skin and with hip-hop as a result, or is it the music I love first, and the color of my skin as a result?
This was the music of the Reagan era’s weak economic conditions experienced by black people in America. No sugary-sweet harmonies or big horn arrangements here. You might call Reagan the godfather of gangster rap.
If Malcolm X hadn’t undergone a transformation but had instead held fast to his racist Nation of Islam conviction that the white man is the devil, I’m sure I would have felt the same.
We humans may have endless plans, schedules, ideas, and desires, but death can step right in and put an end to everything. In the middle of a sentence.
The lack of nutritious food in the ghettos of certain American megacities is so serious that the phenomenon was given a name: food desert. A food desert is any area where it’s impossible to buy fresh fruits or vegetables within a one-mile radius.
Through the sun, the whip, the humiliation, the burden of work, the malaria, the poor food, the wooden benches they stretched their aching bodies out on at night, the trauma of having their children sold away, the systematic rapes, the lynchings, the lack of rights, the hopelessness. No wonder the stories of the Bible spoke to them, drilled their way into the depths of their souls. The stories of the people of Israel were tales of an enslaved people. They must have identified completely. Faith and songs, prayers and cries.
Depending on what happens in your home, it may be the only spot on earth where you are at peace, or it may be the very place that has the power to destroy you.
“If you constantly tell a child it’s good-for-nothing, lazy, thieving, and ugly. If you hit that child and treat it without respect its whole life. What kind of person will it become? What do you think that child will do? We are that child. Four hundred years of abuse, pain, and murder have made us what we are today. Beautiful, terrible, dysfunctional, and strong.”
Harlem makes me feel just as white as a lecture hall at Lund University made me feel black. But it’s there, in the space between—between races, between colors, between the narrative—that I have built myself a place to live. In the in-between-ness.
I muse that the whitewashing of the bloody history of Louisiana and the USA is the greatest factor in why the inequalities are never evened out. The yoke of history can never be cast off if you don’t first recognize that history for what it was.
For the tour guides to wear those wide period dresses that the slave owners’ daughter and wives wore while the slaves were whipped behind the house is like going on a guided tour of Auschwitz led by someone in an SS uniform.
Wow. Yes.
