Speaking on that topic what do you feel we need to do in urban communities to buckle down as a people because yeah we do get harassed now and again, but a lot of times we bring things down on ourselves.

No doubt. I think we have to stress education more. I don’t think we stress education enough.

I’m gonna put you onto what’s going on down here in Baltimore. I think this is something that’s been long planned. Baltimore city is a nice size but the educational system where all the minorities are is going into debt and they are laying off teachers. Not only that they holla that there is so much money missing and they have to lay all these people off but the school that my mother was working at had no computers, no basketball team, no football team, nothing. These kids don’t even know how to use the internet.

They keeping us like that. It’s a conspiracy. Our schools are the worst schools. You can go to any inner city community from Brooklyn to the Delta in Mississippi and we are going to have the worst schools. It’s not that the kids in the suburbs are so much smarter than we are they are just afforded better educational opportunities. They have the best books and computers. They don’t have to stress if I go to school am I going to get shot today or if Ray Ray and them are going to be on the corner and try to take my jacket. Its different things to think about. Things are different now, it’s hard being a kid but I think that they got it a little easier than kids in the eighties. I remember when you couldn’t have nothing, when everybody didn’t have a color TV, a Playstation, a leather jacket, Roc-A-Wear and hundred dollar sneakers. Back then, you had to be gangsta just to come outside. I used to go to Baltimore/DC every once in a while and it used to be real wild, it was just like coming to New York. Now we kinda eased up dudes be wearing ice, it wasn’t like that before but we got tricked really bad. The 90’s up until now was a pretty good time for being black as far as finances are concerned. That was the best time for us. We had all these successful rich, young black sisters and brothers but we didn’t take advantage of that. What we did was buy new things to chase. Before we chased sneakers and leather jackets but then they said everybody can afford that even poor people so we not killing each other for that no more so now we had to step it up. Now its ice and Escalades. It’s like when they dangle the carrot on a stick in front of a donkey to keep him moving. If you catch the carrot, you’re not going to go anywhere anymore. So they keep flipping the carrot on us. We watch the videos and we see this and we see that and everybody is all about what they got. I love the movie Baby Boy when my man Ving Rhames was like ya’ll think you know everything but you don’t know the difference between guns and butter. Guns are assets like property, land, and houses, butter is things like cars and clothes which depreciate in value. So any little wealth we get we give away. Nobody owns all of them Escalades on the road that’s a bank note. The bank is getting that money. All these rappers with the Escalades in their video they are writing them off on their taxes. We never find ways to keep the money in our neighborhood. A black dollar only circulates in the neighborhood for maybe a week. In the Asian community the money stays there for years, it just keeps going back and forth from Chang to Wang.

That’s just like the verse you kicked on the Crooklyn Dodgers part 2. That’s real deep I put that verse in my book on secret societies with stuff on masonry and illuminati and all that.

That’s real though because that’s what I really read, all different books on all that type of stuff because we are not smart. A brother like me has been holding it down for a minute but the people who are supposed to be down with me ain’t really down you know what I mean. They all on something else. Everybody saying you kicking that real and all that and saying this and that and the third but really they don’t care they on the next thing now. If it’s about ice then we on ice now. My thing is I just try to keep it moving, keep my mental open and observe what’s going on. We need to educate ourselves. We got the brothers Dead Prez and they be kicking a lot of revolutionary and all that, but the revolution is mental first. You can’t give no idiot a gun. That’s the problem now. We can’t give no idiots guns and expect to be liberated. We have to liberate our minds and knowing that our school systems are the worst and that there are no books we have to start encouraging each other at home to read and write. My mother taught for years also and she was really upset with the public school system. She was in one of the worst schools in the worst areas. One of her students, Gavin Cato, was the kid who got killed in the Crown Heights Riot. She used to always tell me how its messed up and how they treat the kids like animals and that they don’t care what’s going on. They just trying to get the funding in the school just to keep it moving and people are stealing money out of the system and they don’t care about the children. I learned to read at home before I went to school. We gotta stress education because if we don’t stress that, all the gun clapping and whatever ain’t gonna mean nothing.

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Posted by Halftime on Saturday, February 7th, 2004 and is filed under HIP HOP ICON SERIES.