Life & Wisdom Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks takes a bureaucratic term and snaps it in half. "Minority" is supposed to be descriptive, even neutral, but in American life it often smuggles in a ranking system: fewer in number becomes lesser in value. Her opening command - "Don't let anyone call you" - frames language as a site of combat, not etiquette. The fight isn’t only against slurs; it’s against polite labels that quietly manage expectations, funding, attention, and dignity.

The line works because it refuses the soothing trap of "empowerment" rhetoric and goes straight for the mechanics of power: who gets to name whom. Brooks is not denying demographics. She’s rejecting a public vocabulary that makes Blackness and Latinidad sound like a footnote to the default. The subtext is a warning about internalization. Once you accept a term that implies smaller, peripheral, dependent, you start negotiating with yourself before the world even shows up.

Context matters. Brooks came up in a century where Black artists were routinely treated as "Negro poets" first and poets second, their work boxed into sociology rather than art. Her career moved from early formal mastery to politically sharpened work after the Black Arts Movement, when questions of naming, ownership, and self-definition were urgent, practical stakes. This is that urgency distilled.

"You're not less than anybody else" reads almost disarmingly plain, which is the point: after stripping away the misdirection of labels, she leaves a blunt moral baseline. Not a plea for inclusion, but a refusal to be measured by someone else’s yardstick.