The Black Power Mixtape

I'm finally watching the documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.  It's blowing my mind on so many levels, mostly because (I'm ashamed to admit) I know very little about the full scope of the black movement in the 60s-70s.  Definitely recommend.

I especially love this quote from Courtney Callender, who was also New York City's first African American Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.

“This whole kind of, uh, falling in love with black things for a short period of time is essentially racist. It still is hypothesized on a great sense of separateness and a sense of treating black activities as kind of a curiosity either benign or threatening one or the other. When it’s threatening, you know, they’re gonna riot or something; and when it’s benign, let them paint or draw or sing or dance or whatever they want to do until we the white community get tired of it. And that whole structure is essentially racist.”

Sigh.  The more things change, the more they stay the same?  We've come so far as a country, and still have so very far to go.