Dankwa Brooks

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
― Toni Morrison

“many white people simply stopped in their tracks to watch me pass. The drape and the cut of a zoot suit showed to the best advantage if you were tall—and I was over six feet. My conk was fire-red. I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.” My knob-toed, orange-colored “kick-up” shoes were nothing but Florsheims, the ghetto’s Cadillac of shoes in those days. (Some shoe companies made these ridiculous styles for sale only in the black ghettoes where ignorant Negroes like me would pay the big-name price for something that we associated with being rich.)”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“All of us—who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries—were, instead, black victims of the white man’s American social system.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Since most New Yorkers had never heard of Lansing, I would name Detroit. Gradually, I began to be called “Detroit Red”—and it stuck.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X