Linton Kwesi Johnson Quotes

I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage - though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.

There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.

We don't have as much prejudice as we did 40 years ago, but today it is more educated.

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

Racism is old, but Peele found a poetic new way of talking about it. He gave us language we didn't know we lacked.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother's employer's family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home.

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

I'm a student of Ice Cube and Scarface, which means the stuff I rap about is not radio-friendly, and it's very opinionated. and it's very much from the perspective of a black man in America, and our opinion ain't always popular when we have a political opinion.

I can't turn around without hearing about some 'civil rights advance's White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting 'hallelujah's Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back — and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!

When I was in Africa, this voice came to me and said, "Richard, what do you see?" I said, "I see all types of people." The voice said, "But do you see any niggers?" I said, "No." It said, "Do you know why? 'Cause there aren't any."

A people who have suffered so much for so long at hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.... the black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.

Black women's lives have never been shown any value in America.

I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.

We have seen communities cry out in pain, generation after generation, because of racism and police brutality.

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

The Black Lives Matter movement has to, by its very nature, be intersectional because of the complexities of who black people are in this country and throughout the world.

It's much easier to talk about racism when you're able to use mutants as a metaphor. People would much rather talk about Charles Xavier and Magneto than they would about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.

The whole reason behind my album 'Free TC' is seeing all that police brutality, injustice, mass incarceration.

Berry was a transitional and, to my mind, revolutionary black figure who had to find a place for the rage that the crucible of racism created.

I think it's important to realize that the players who are protesting aren't protesting the anthem. They're not protesting the flag. People kind of move the goalposts on them and try to tell them what they're protesting. But as they keep saying, that's not what they're protesting.