A Quote by Geoffrey Canada
When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.
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I was a huge theater geek growing up, and that was not the easiest thing in the world, especially growing up in Chicago, where sports are really the norm. I was always off to the theater at night, from 7 years old on. Friends there in the Midwest who could talk to you about the idiosyncrasies of 'Pippin' were few and far between.
It's become such a cultural norm that people brag about it: "Oh yeah, you did that? I did this." Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about "I have the bigger house and car," and now it's much more about how much stuff you can cram into your calendar.
I was bad, but I was one of the kids that never got caught. If anyone ever knew I did something, it was because I told them. 'Cause I'm a really good liar, so I end up snitching on myself.
Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.
I think it's kinda funny that all these rappers that used to be gangsters and thugs are telling us not to download their music from the internet, because that's stealing. Wow talk about ironic.
But when you talk about the education and you talk about the lack of recreation for kids to do, I mean, it's second to none in New Orleans when you talk about the lack of opportunities for young people. And it's not just black kids, it's white kids. It's Asian kids. I had Vietnamese kids in my class that had lack of opportunities.
I don't hide anything about my life, I talk about everything. I talk about it - all kinds of things. I've done songs about bad experiences, a couple about growing up in the ghetto and being abused, sexually. Being raped. And I talk about it.
If you're writing in the mainstream... Whatever that is - the norm. The norm is likely going to be funded because you're giving people what they're used to and what they're gonna get. But anything outside of that norm is going to struggle to get funded. The people who are not "the norms" deserve the chance to make art. I think it's great for all of us to consume all these voices, and that happens when you support these voices that need to be supported because they're not the automatic choice coming out of the gate.
Trans kids are living in the future in a way. When I was growing up, "transgender" wasn't even a word. It wasn't used. Just the naming of something that's invisible, or was thought of as shameful or different - giving it a name that's not a slur is powerful. It's still a little hard to imagine what it might look like growing older as a trans man, but I think that's going to change for the next generation. For trans kids growing up, that visual bridge towards their future selves is starting to develop in conjunction with this trans media wave we're in.
Kids growing up today will have what I never did growing up, which is somebody across that screen reflecting who they are, and showing them what is possible.
I talk about role models a lot and wanting to be a role model for kids around me because I didn't have that growing up.
The left believes that we're an unwarranted, undeserving superpower because we're a racist, bigoted nation from our founding. So Obama presides over America's decline and tells everybody "get used to it. This is the new norm." The new norm is no full-time jobs. The new norm is government getting bigger. The new norm is you having no wage increases for 15 years. This is what the new norm is, as we entered the global marketplace. And the American people don't want any part of that. That's not America.
I have never had other kids in the house... I had a huge collection of marbles, and they all had names, which I think concerned my parents. I used to go and sweep outside and talk to myself, and my mum's friends would be over and say, 'Do you realise she is talking to herself?'
When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family - not even my mother - who I could look to and be like, 'I know you've never said anything homophobic.' So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you've heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.
Growing up in the inner city, a lot of kids didn't think reading was cool. I'm trying to show them that it is cool and the importance of growing and learning outside of their everyday lives, which is a lot of times sports.
When they're growing up, if you tell kids God exists, they believe it. It's the same with the techno-cultural society. They believe in it - that it's the road to paradise, that there are no limits.
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