Drugs is a government game, Bilal. A way to rob us of our best black men, our army. Everyone who plays the game loses. Then they get you right back where we started, in slavery! Then they get to say "This time you did it to yourself." I won't play that game.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how drugs are used as a tool for oppression and exploitation within society.
Sister Souljah's quote emphasizes the destructive impact of the drug trade on black communities, suggesting that it serves as a mechanism for systemic oppression. It portrays drugs as a strategy by the government to undermine the strength of black men, leading to cycles of incarceration and social disadvantage, which are then blamed on the individuals themselves. The quote advocates for the rejection of this 'game' as a means of empowerment and self-preservation.
In practice
In a speech addressing social issues, one might cite this quote to illustrate the impact of drugs on the community.
No one can remain married today because they are not married to the one they love, they are married to their sacrifice, and pretending to love is too damned painful. Love and build, love and work, love and fight. Always love first. Anything placed before love will fail.
To be a real man or woman, you've got to know what you believe in. You've got to understand that your actions have consequences and that they are connected to everything that you are.
I never said I was an angel. Nor am I innocent or holy like the Virgin Mary. What I am is natural and serious and as sensitive as an open nerve on an ice cube.
Love and build, love and work, love and fight. Always love first. Anything placed before love will fail.
Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.
(Farm workers) are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves.
I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Being a young black man, observing and sensing the need for race equality and women's rights, I wrote about what was important to me.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.