Do you know how important you are?
Do you know that our people slept laying spoon fashion in the filthy hatches of slave ships
in their own and in each other’s excrement and in their
urine
and menstrual flow so that you could live
200 years later?
Do you know that?
Do you know that our people stood on auction blocks
So that you could live?
When is the last time someone told you how important you
are?
Maya Angelou to Tupac
Shakur on the set of Poetic Justice. She repeated this story to Dave Chappelle
during the taping of the show Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel, where she and he sat and talked.
