“Hughes was the first black American writer many of us ever read... and his career remains an inspiring model for black writers determined to make a living solely from their work.”
“Rakim's persona is that of a sagacious gangster, like Miles Davis's ... We're talking about that school of self-confirmed bad-assed-ness, where you don't need spectators to know you're looking sugarshit sharp. Drop Miles or Rakim on the moon, they'd still be chilly-most”
"My beef is, okay, you got De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, and that whole new Afrocentric, boho hiphop posse and they're progressive, but the muhfuhkuhs put on the weakest shows in God's creation."
Washington Heights: That was where I’d found my kind of party people, that 25-to-35-year-old posse of race-conscious black professionals and community organizers whose politics are Pan-Afrikanist (if not just pro-black)
The five stories in this issue do not presume to represent the New York black experience in total. What they do presume to capture are the encounters five black writers had with people in several of New York's black communities.
“If there’s any legacy of ’60s Black Nationalism I find ennobling and empowering, it’s that movement’s Pan-Afrikanist embrace of Black folk everywhere as brother and sister.”
“X is dead, long live X. He’s like the Elvis of Black pop politics — a real piece of Afro-Americana. That’s why Spike’s logo is branded with an American flag. Malcolm couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”
“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmodernist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”
