You don’t want to let anybody’s expectations down. People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. I should have seen life like that and stay out of trouble, and don’t do this and don’t do that. But it’s hard to live up to some people’s expectations, which [I] wasn’t cut out to be. I didn’t go to school to be “Rodney King” and [be] beat up by cops and thrust into the limelight. It’s taken years to get used to the situation I’m in in life and the weight it holds. One of the cops in the jail [in a later encounter] said: You know what? People are going to know who you are when you’re dead and gone. A hundred years from now, people still going to be talking about you. It’s scary, but at the same time it’s a blessing.

Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin, to such extent that you bleach to get like the white man? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose, and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind—who taught you to hate the race that you belong to, so much so that you don’t wanna be around each other? Who taught you to hate being what God gave you?

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t even begun to pull the knife out. They won’t even admit the knife is there.