I Am The History Of The Rejection

Our Children Will Not Survive Our Habits Of Thinking, Our Failures Of The Spirit, Our Wreck Of The Universe Into Which We Bring New Life As Blithely As We Do. Mostly, Our Children Will Resemble Our Own Misery And Spite And Anger, Because We Give Them No Choice About It. In The Name Of Motherhood And Fatherhood And Education And Good Manners, We Threaten And Suffocate And Bind And Ensnare And Bribe And Trick Children Into Wholesale Emulation Of Our Ways.

In America, You Can Segregate The People, But The Problems Will Travel. From Slavery To Equal Rights, From State Suppression Of Dissent To Crime, Drugs And Unemployment, I Can't Think Of A Supposedly Black Issue That Hasn't Wasted The Original Black Target Group And Then Spread Like Measles To Outlying White Experience.

The Music Of Language Became Extremely Important To Me, And Obvious To Me. By The Time I Was Seven I Was Writing Myself. I Was A Poet

In America, The Traditional Routes To Black Identity Have Hardly Been Normal. Suicide (disappearance By Imitation, Or Willed Extinction), Violence (hysterical Religiosity, Crime, Armed Revolt), And Exemplary Moral Courage; None Of These Is Normal.

Self-determination Has To Mean That The Leader Is Your Individual Gut, And Heart, And Mind Or We're Talking About Power, Again, And Its Rather Well-known Impurities. Who Is Really Going To Care Whether You Live Or Die And Who Is Going To Know The Most Intimate Motivation For Your Laughter And Your Tears Is The Only Person To Be Trusted To Speak For You And To Decide What You Will Or Will Not Do.