Do you know how important you are?

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.