First 25 Flashcards
“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction…a system that enslaves you cannot free you.”
W.E.B Dubois
“…his life unabashedly glorified the lifestyle that ended up killing him…” - AIDS is ruthless, so take it easy.
Michelle Cepeda, And it don’t stop
The sunset looks beautiful over the projects/ what a shame it ain’t the same where we stand.
Mobb Deep
Houston Sr.’s answer to the aching incoherence of his boyhood was summed up in an exhortation he barked at my brothers and me if he ever found us on the brink of tears. “Be a man!” There was nothing, mind you, ethnic or racial in this. Just, “Be a man!”
Houston Baker, I don’t hate the South, 5
Skin color and death are twinned realities of southern life upon the Sewanee, beside the Delta, on the rich loam of the southern Black Belt
Houston Baker, I don’t hate the South, 43
…if bitterness, hatred, and violence are reflexive behavioral and rhetorical responses to life behind an imprisoning Jim Crow vale, then lyrical, idealistic, meditative, visionary, and progressive iterations of a better life represent the better impulses and angels of the black American people.”
Houston Baker, I don’t hate the South, 71
If history were the past, history wouldn’t matter. History is the present, the present. you and I are history (151)
James Baldwin, A Rap on Race
The first failure is reason. The first and only virtue is love. I catch because I love. Not to catch is to die, now or later
Houston Baker, I don’t hate the South, 174
We got the feel of the blues, the togetherness of funk music, and the conviction of gospel music, the energy of rock and improvisation of Jazz.
Andre 3000 (from Grem 2006, The South Got Something to Say)
None of my heroes wear suits…
Allen ivewrson (from Hopkinson and Moore, 2006, 78)
Curiousity can be some bullshit, straight up.
Kofi “Debo” Ajabu (from Hopkinson and Morre, 2006: 169)
This not life. This some strange other stuff…”
Kofi “Debo” Ajabu (from Hopkinson and Morre, 2006: 185)
“As I look at black cultures in general, they are shaped and defined between several forces: between the secular and the sacred; between prosperity and poverty; between the artistic and the empirical” he explains. From where I stand now…black culture is constantly being redefined between the forces of religious identities and secular passions. At its best, this sense of betweeness express itself in acts of resistance undergirded by spiritual values like faith in Dyson’s case and love in the case of bell hooks”
McPahil 2002 (from “Dessentializing Difference: Transformative Visions in Contemporary Black Thought”)
“If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable”
Noliwe Rooks (from White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race and Higher Education: 43)
“If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down. And if they get nine stories built, it’s yours. Take it ove, and maybe we’ll let them in on the weekends” (Rooks 43)
Rap Brown on a gym that was being built in Harlem (from White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race and Higher Education: 43)
