The Pussycat Dolls in 2012 |
I don’t know most of the rules in football. As a kid when I was interested in it I knew a lot of the rules. I loved sitting with my father on Saturdays or Sundays watching the Cleveland Browns play anybody. Back then the Washington DC football team was all white and refused to hire any coloreds, but Jim Brown, back then, sparked race pride much deeper than Jackie Robinson because Jim Brown didn’t have mercy and he didn’t need to play ‘the game’ he controlled the game and the image of himself was the image he put on the screen. Negroes back then got it, and we wuz closer to the emancipation of slaves than we is now, and could feel these things in the subtle ways of our grandparents even if white folks had another language for Jim Brown’s speed and fierceness. We were proud of Jackie Robinson. He was elegant and a class act, and that was important. Wasn’t no child didn’t hear his or her parents or some other grown folk say, “Chile, you gotta be better than the whites. You need to be better and smarter than the dumbest white man and the smarter than any man… White folks’ll hire the dumbest white to be your boss, but you and they gots ta know you’se smarther than they...” - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
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