People will not…

People will not challenge us. They must treat us with silence…So watch who people quote when it comes to Black scholarship. If they’re quoted forget them…If they are considered the most “compelling,” the most “brilliant,” what you see then is someone that does not help us. It is the invisible. It is the ones that we know. The ones that do not receive grants, the ones that are not lauded or called “super heroes” in each other’s books. Or worse still the ones who are not considered the best by White scholars who stand over our archives like vultures keeping our history hostage and asking as the price of admission that you trade your soul for access to the things that your Ancestors inscribed. Those people that write on the backs of books that “this is the finest new scholar,” that is the person that you should never quote. Rather, buy all their books. Read them for the sources. Get the sources yourself because what they have contributed is not a frame for interpreting but rather they have just given you a roadmap to the things that you need to reclaim. – Greg Kemathi Carr

Some words from my professor found at the beginning of the introduction to Dr. Jared Ball’s book  “I Mix What I Like,” a work that analyzes the corporate control or colonization of the music industry by major record labels and how the “homemade hip-hop mixtape” can serve as an “emancipatory tool for community resistance.”