"And understand: class differences will not save you"
About this Quote
A warning and a diagnosis: the hierarchies of money and status will not shield you from the deeper forces that structure American life. H. Rap Brown, the fiery SNCC chairman and Black Power icon of the late 1960s, saw up close how the promise of class mobility could be used to pacify a people while leaving the machinery of racial domination intact. Middle-class respectability, college degrees, a good job, the symbols of arrival in the American dream were not antidotes to a system that polices Black bodies first and asks questions later. A suit does not stop a nightstick. A mortgage does not stop a traffic stop.
The line pushes back against respectability politics, which tells the oppressed to behave, to assimilate, to prove worthiness to a society bent on proving the opposite. Brown insists that the harm is structural and organized; therefore safety must be collective and political, not individual and performative. He was speaking during a decade of uprisings, COINTELPRO surveillance, and assassinations, when even the most polished civil rights leaders were met with state violence. It was a moment that revealed that class elevation within a racial caste does not dissolve the caste.
There is also a strategic lesson. Class differences inside a community can become fault lines that the powerful exploit. If the aspiring few imagine themselves protected, they are easier to separate from the many and to turn into examples of token progress. Brown rejects that wedge. He urges a solidarity that does not collapse class analysis but refuses to let it obscure the stubborn durability of white supremacy and state power.
Even now, the maxim holds: wealth can buffer but not absolve. Black professionals are profiled, celebrities are stopped, neighborhoods are overpoliced regardless of income. The call is to invest less faith in individual escape and more in collective transformation, to see safety not as a private purchase but as a public achievement wrested from institutions built to deny it.
The line pushes back against respectability politics, which tells the oppressed to behave, to assimilate, to prove worthiness to a society bent on proving the opposite. Brown insists that the harm is structural and organized; therefore safety must be collective and political, not individual and performative. He was speaking during a decade of uprisings, COINTELPRO surveillance, and assassinations, when even the most polished civil rights leaders were met with state violence. It was a moment that revealed that class elevation within a racial caste does not dissolve the caste.
There is also a strategic lesson. Class differences inside a community can become fault lines that the powerful exploit. If the aspiring few imagine themselves protected, they are easier to separate from the many and to turn into examples of token progress. Brown rejects that wedge. He urges a solidarity that does not collapse class analysis but refuses to let it obscure the stubborn durability of white supremacy and state power.
Even now, the maxim holds: wealth can buffer but not absolve. Black professionals are profiled, celebrities are stopped, neighborhoods are overpoliced regardless of income. The call is to invest less faith in individual escape and more in collective transformation, to see safety not as a private purchase but as a public achievement wrested from institutions built to deny it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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