A Quote by Forest Whitaker
I've been trying to understand conflict and violence ever since I was a kid. You know. There were a few things that happened even on my block - the Black Panthers used to be right around the corner from where we were.
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Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.
N.W.A were the audio-documentarians of their time. They were trying to shock people with the violence of their language and the subjects they were talking about. The fact that they dressed in guerilla outfits like the Black Panthers made them shocking by their appearance as well.
There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be 'a black kid'. I was who I was. Which isn't to say things haven't happened to me that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't black.
You can't imagine hip-hop without the Black Panthers. Today, hopefully, the movement can be an inspiration to people. These were people who made mistakes but they were trying to change things.
Oakland had a lot of pride attached to the Panthers. A lot of people were connected to it in some kind of way and a lot of people who weren't Panthers supported the Panthers. You'd see Huey P. Newton around, and people would be like, 'That's Huey right there.'
It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.
Usually we look at it like, "Oh, black people couldn't vote in Mississippi because they had to take a literacy test." But one of the things you learn in the film is that there were major consequences for even trying to vote. You could be killed for trying to vote. You could definitely be fired from your job and many were, which is why so few black Mississippians even attempted to register early on. They put your name in the newspaper if you tried to register to vote.
It never surprises me how good Shaun is. Even the coaches are surprised by the things he does and I can understand why. He can strike the ball so hard, yet his legs are only about 12 inches long. But I've been watching him do things like that ever since we were kids. I know what he's capable of.
Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.
In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.
Trying to build myself up with the fact that I have done things right that were even good and have had moments that were excellent but the bad is heavier to carry around and feel have no confidence.
I used to write songs that mimicked other songs that I would hear as a kid, cos I was 12 years old when I was writing those, right. And you hear a radio so all I'd write about was [sings] "hey girl, look at you", you know what I mean. I think that even doing that made it easier for me to write non-personal songs because, from a kid, I never wrote personal songs, they were always like mimicking. And now I'm just trying to understand my writing and where it's coming from.
The worst things that ever happened to me were before I was 20. It has been slow, hard-won improvement since then.
Nothing's new since Genesis. And so everybody in their life thinks history began when they were born. Most people's historical perspective happened when they were born in the sense that nothing has ever been this bad. "We've never gone before this before," and of course we have. Things have been worse in many ways in the country.
My family were staunch believers in physical violence, not automatic violence, and we had a Safeway around the corner, so we never really needed to kill anything.
I'd been taking things apart and inventing things since I was a little kid... I still have memories as a child trying to really understand how things work.
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