Racial exclusion from the mainstream economy, he later reasoned, meant that “almost everyone in Harlem needed some kind of hustle to survive, and needed to stay high in some way to forget what they had to do to survive. . . . In one sense, we were huddled in there, bonded together in seeking security and warmth, and comfort from each other, and we didn’t know it. All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead black victims of the white man’s America social system.” 32 Such analyses would come later.
