Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • black power.

  • It means to me when I sit now 1989 and have my a 60 year old black child on my own lap and her little short Afro.

  • And I know that my face in her hair and I say, Oh, I love your hair.

  • It is so wonderful in your brown skin.

  • It's so pretty.

  • That's what that's a lot of what black power left it was.

  • It was a rejection.

  • It was a fundamental rejection of all those rotten lies on paper told us all this time, Otis, that mind wide nose and my thick lips in my kinky hair made me inferior.

  • Uh, there is no way that, uh, my 30 year old daughter could be as beautiful as Michelle Pfeiffer reaches.

  • But we believed it.

  • We believed it because they had to culture.

  • They had the power, they made the movie shows.

  • And, um, they put they put to Rita Hayworth on the cover of Life magazine instead of Lena Horne er or or some other black woman who was had blacker features.

  • They were the ones who made us the buffoons and the studs and the mammy's, you know, they were the ones who told us we were slow and couldn't talk right and all the rest of it.

  • And the worst thing you can do to human being is toe.

  • Make her him believe he didn't count.

  • I can't do anything, have all the things that all the offenses that were done to me and other people, about which I get angry.

  • That's the one that just drives me crazy.

  • When people said Black is beautiful, I didn't see it as a put down of anyone I saw.

  • It is an assertion of a truth, the truth.

  • And I tell my daughter every day when I notice her here now, obviously had a heated time with a topic that is that explosive that is that personal.

  • It is not abstract to me.

  • I mean, when I say these things, of course I understand what it means for millions of other black people, but it's also me personally as my Children.

  • Personally, my defense of my Children and I am profoundly offended that the society still assaults all three of my Children that way profoundly offended.

  • It makes me so angry.

  • I don't know when you have something that is that explosive Of course, it is not going to be contained so that it doesn't hurt somebody.

  • So it becomes not just black is beautiful.

  • Black is beautiful, you honky, it becomes a weapon.

  • And it did.

  • And, uh, the need for black self determination also became in some, uh, place is a desire from black exclusivity and in some places, fought conformity become, you know, and suddenly, you know, everything would be taken to an excess And itwas there were there were ugly fringes up, but there's no question about it.

black power.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it