“Love says: I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.”

“Women are everything. Man is just a muscle.”

“I believe wholeheartedly, and without apology, that we have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them. Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values. But they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together.”

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We are the greatest victims of colonial rule. We are exposed to this country’s strongest institutions every day. We find that what is called “education” is not education at all. What it is, is white nationalist propaganda. Black people are made to hate themselves. I saw a brother on the corner once, trying to figure out what was wrong with his skin-it didn’t match his flesh-colored bandaid.

Media is used against us in total. The W.P.P. (white power people, or the white power press, or white people’s power-take your choice) all victimize Blacks. The rebellion’s aftermath brought demands in the white press not for the resolution of historic grievances of oppressed Blacks but for the guillotining of Carmichael or myself. The Negro press is no better. They wait for white folks to tell them what to say. The tactic of media is to make you an enemy of the people. Enemies of the people are always vulnerable. The reason Malcolm could be killed and Black folks didn’t revolt is that the press had made Malcolm an enemy of the people. The reason they could give Muhammad Ali the maximum sentence and fine was because the press had made him an enemy of the people. The reason Adam Powell could be politically lynched and Black folks didn’t revolt, was because Adam had been made an enemy of the people. Negroes believe anything the press says.

Anything you don’t control can be used as a weapon against you. Education is used as a weapon against us. News media is used as a weapon against us. Athletics. We dominate in athletics, but we don’t control them. Therefore the Negro athlete is used as a weapon against us. This country realizes that the athlete has an image in our community. So they get some ol’ bootlicking, shuffling, money-mad Negro, who can run or jump, and they tell him, “Go control your people.” The same thing goes for entertainers.

Another thing that is used effectively against Blacks is the court system. There is no justice in this country for Black people. Justice is a joke, and it stinks of hypocrisy [names Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover]. Justice means “just-us-white-folks.” There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country. When the government becomes the lawbreaker, people must become law enforcers.

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By 1680, you see the beginning of the changes. What had happened - and this is a complicated story - was that colonial leaders had to deal with Bacon and that rebellion. The British sent a fleet of three ships and by the time they got to Virginia, there were 8,000 poor men rebelling who had burned down Jamestown - blacks, whites, mulattos. And it was quite clear that this kind of unity and solidarity among the poor was dangerous.

After that, they began to pass laws, very gradually. They passed laws that gave Europeans privileges while they increasingly enslaved Africans. They passed a number of laws that prevented blacks, Indians, and mulattos from owning firearms, for example. Everybody had firearms. Everybody in Virginia still has firearms!

Then there was another change: There was a decline in the number of European servants coming to the New World. At the same time, there was an increase in the ships bringing Africans to the New World. By the 1690s or so, the English themselves had outfitted their ships to bring Africans back from the continent, and this is the first time that they had had direct connections.

But the Africans also had something else. They had skills which neither the Indians nor the Irish had. The Africans brought here were farmers. They knew how to farm semi-tropical crops. They knew how to build houses. They were brick makers, for example. They were carpenters and calabash carvers and rope makers and leather workers. They were metal workers. They were people who knew how to smelt ore and get iron out of it. They had so many skills that we don’t often recognize. But the colony leaders certainly recognized that. And they certainly gave high value to those slaves who had those skills.

After 1690 things begin to change. All of the Europeans become identified as “white.” And Africans take on a different kind of identity. They are not only heathens, but they are people who are perceived as vulnerable to being enslaved. And that’s a major point. Africans were vulnerable because it became part of the consciousness that they had no rights as Englishmen. Even the poorest Englishman knew that he had some rights. But once a planter owns a few Africans, the idea that the Africans had no rights that they had to recognize became very clear. And that’s why they were vulnerable to being enslaved, and kept in slavery. The laws that were passed after that all tended to diminish the rights of African people. But between 1690 and 1735, even those Africans who had been free and who had been there for many generations, had their rights taken away from them.

Once you magnify the difference between the slaves and the free, then it was possible to create a society in which the slaves were little better than animals. They were thought of as animals. And the more you think of slaves as animals, the more you justify keeping them as slaves.

After a while, slavery became identified with Africans. Blackness and slavery went together in the popular mind. And this is why we can say that race is a product of the popular mind, because it was this consciousness that blackness and slavery were bound together, that gave people the idea that Africans were a different kind of people.

Think of the early 17th century planter who wrote to the trustees of his company and he said, “Please don’t send us any more Irishmen. Send us some Africans, because the Africans are civilized and the Irish are not.” But 100 years later, the Africans become increasingly brutalized. They become increasingly homogenized into a category called “savages.” And all the attributes of savagery which the English had once given to the Irish, now they are giving to the Africans.

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