A Quote by Spike Lee
We've got to turn this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A's and speaking proper English: that's criminal.
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Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African American kids are unemployed. It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.
We depend on the critics to give us a glimpse of what happened. Bernard Shaw championed Ibsen, who got the most terrible notices for his plays. Kenneth Tynan championed young writers, and as a result, the theatre has changed radically.
For instance, if you're a black guy and you got pulled over, and you didn't know that any other black men were being pulled over, you would constantly in the back of your head be thinking, "What did I do?" rather than, "I didn't do anything, these are just the conditions I live under."
I got tired of seeing otherwise innocent young kids from all walks of life getting criminal records for, in effect, doing nothing more than millions of other people in society were doing with alcohol.
Young black men are not only being arrested and channeled into the criminal justice system in record numbers, they are also being targeted by the police, harassed by security forces, and in some instances killed because they are black and assumed to be dangerous.
I got a naughty thrill out of listening to music that was that dirty, especially being that young and able to listen to it around my parents. Kids would come over to my house to listen to Too $hort records.
I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years.
My peers at the time: you know, young black kids from off the streets of Harlem, having these conversations with me in my small, dirty little studio up in Harlem.
My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.
I think the people who have been finding it harder and harder to feed their kids - the young people who are afraid "I'm never going to have a job and be able to provide for a family," all of that can turn around and it can turn around quickly.
I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.
James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.
We've become an underground thing for kids, because we never got the love our peers got back in the day. Kids are loving discovering us, and I'm happy to be that band.
It's important for a lot of young black males to value swagger over intelligence. Swagger is important, but intelligence must come before the swagger.
When you make a mistake or get ridiculed or rejected, look at mistakes as learning experiences, and ridicule as ignorance. Look at rejection as part of one performance, not as a turn down of the performer.
When I was younger, living in an all-black neighborhood the other kids thought I was better than them because of my light skin and straight hair. Then we moved to an all-white neighborhood and that was a culture shock ... I'd been used to being around all black kids.
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