"The reason the police are so hated in the ghetto is...because you don't have to be more than fifteen years old at the very most to realize that the cop is not there to protect you but to protect Mr. Charlie's property. And that makes his presence absolutely intolerable."
"When I was growing up it was...yes, it's true, there was a kind of resignation. The whole style came out of a certain kind of resignation which is gone forever...Even people who got educated realized that they were still in a trap. I knew too many people who had been to college who were shuffling around with garbage cans to be fooled about what education would do. And now it is very different. It is very different because the image that black people have of themselves has changed. It is utterly changed, and it has changed because of objective reasons. It has changed because the world has changed. It has changed because of what we have seen on television: black leaders, black riots, white liars. It has changed because the power of white people to control my mind--black minds--has been broken, and that is a very important shift. It is perfectly true: no one growing up now has before them the vista that I had when I was growing up. Though that, paradoxically, increases the poverty and rage, doesn't it?"
"If I were young I would find myself with no morals."
All quotations taken from A Rap on Race (1970).
