Friday, May 30, 2014

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.