Bakari Quotes

#1. Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. It would be great if corporate America didn't do this, but there is a huge market for sex and violence and anti-Black representations in America and the world that doesn't begin or end with hip-hop.

Bakari Kitwana

#2. We live in a society that refuses to set a standard for what we will allow American entertainment to expose to our children. I think we need to set a standard that is entertainment industry wide, not just limited to hip-hop.

Bakari Kitwana

#3. The question 'Why white kids love hip-hop?' forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.

Bakari Kitwana

#4. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot.

Ted Hughes

#5. I agree that a lot of mainstream corporate sold hip-hop is self-hating.

Bakari Kitwana

#6. There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.

Julian Barnes

#7. Hip-Hop's cultural movement is much larger than the corporate representation. The images most of hip-hop's critics point to are those manufactured by major corporations whether on television, via Viacom, or on the radio, via Radio One and Clear Channel.

Bakari Kitwana

#8. The Real Beloved is that one who is Unique,
who is your Beginning and your End.

Rumi

#9. People try to build their identity around external things such as appearance and the clothes at the expense of neglecting the inner values of who they really are

Sunday Adelaja

#10. I really didn't try to make an effort to make urban music, but I am a product of my inspirations.

Justin Timberlake

#11. Awareness yields to itself, to its inherent creativity, to its expression in form, to experience itself.

Adyashanti

#12. Hip-hop is a complex music and culture that has been reduced to a one-dimensional critique. Hip-hop's messages aren't all bad. Neither are they all good.

Bakari Kitwana

#13. I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.

George Murray

#14. Our hearts are raging idol factories.

Stephen Altrogge

#15. And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.

Bakari Kitwana

#16. It's awkward going to parties with people you don't know, especially when they think they know you.

Nicholas Hoult

#17. The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

Sigmund Freud

#18. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers - that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.

Carol S. Dweck

#19. We need to look beyond the obvious. Yes, there are minstrel images in hip-hop. Yes, there are demeaning, anti-racist, misogynistic and homophobic representations. We could make the same case about the church and our government. But hip-hop, like society, isn't one dimensional.

Bakari Kitwana

#20. There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things.

Mark Zuckerberg

#21. Locally lived hip-hop culture that is giving many of America's youth the tool they need to survive and thrive in America, in the face of public policy that have written too many young people off.

Bakari Kitwana

#22. Many of America's historical cornbreads were staple breads for people who didn't have many other options.

Jeremy Jackson

#23. I'm not a poster boy for misogyny and I don't think hip-hop should be either.

Bakari Kitwana

#24. The decision on whether to ban anyone from the U.K. is made by the home secretary on the basis of the evidence at the time.

Theresa May

#25. Wigger: a young white who wants desperately to be down with hip-hop, who identifies more strongly with Black culture than white. (What's disturbing about this expression is its racist implications: if white kids down with hip-hop are "wiggers," what does that make Black kids down with hip-hop?)

Bakari Kitwana

#26. Have you ever been anyone's?"
"No. And you?"
"I've never wanted to."
"Neither have I. Until I saw this lovely girl in Seattle, with big gold eyes, and pink, full lips ... and I wondered if she could understand me ...

Katy Evans