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" New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. "

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" In the barbershop, there's democracy. You're a professor; you're an engineer; you're a garbage man, have at it. You got something to say, get down with it. "

Michael Eric Dyson

Garbage

Say

You

" I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence. "

" Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry. "

" I want young people to look at me and go, 'Damn, I want to be like that brother. He sharp, he be on point. He represent black people.' I want to make the life of the mind sexy. "

" Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent. "

" When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail. "

" Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes. "

" Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting. "

" I think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of black identity and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s, will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition. "

" Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal and bloody fields of political mission. "

" I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent. "

" White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder. "

" My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me. "

" I didn't get to college until my 20s, because I was a young father on welfare and had to take all kind of jobs to support my young son. There's what frames my view on the topics I discuss on my shows, and the average person relates to that. No matter how many degrees I have now, I lived that life, and that comes through to the people watching. "

" By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth. "

" I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made. "

" The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines. "

" I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone. "

" Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music. Remember, he was a chocolate, cherubic-faced genius with an African American halo. He had an Afro halo. He was a kid who was capable of embodying all of the high possibilities and the deep griefs that besieged the African American psyche. "

" Oprah Winfrey represents the most ingenious and creative expression of black spiritual genius in the public mainstream that we've had in quite a long time, if ever. "

" I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable. "

" I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them. "

" You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him. "

" Michael Jackson carried urban America and eventually American society on his vocal cords for a good 25 to 30 years before even hip-hop became the vox populi of America, and then as an adult he shattered racial barriers. "

" I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century. "

" Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement. "

" Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius. "

" When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this. "

" Race was thick in the O.J. Simpson case from the very beginning, but it wasn't evident. And I think the O.J. Simpson case revealed that there is subtle race, and there is sophisticated race, and there's evident and observable race. "

" I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit. "