Politics & Power Quote by H. Rap Brown

Brown is doing political chemistry here: he’s combining separate “minority” stories into a single combustible category, the dispossessed. That word is the hinge. It sidesteps polite integration talk and replaces it with a property argument: who has been stripped of land, labor, safety, and self-determination, and who benefits from that stripping. The list that follows isn’t demographic bookkeeping; it’s coalition-building as diagnosis. By naming Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and Black people in one breath, he’s insisting these aren’t parallel grievances competing for attention, but connected outcomes of the same national machinery.

The intent is clarifying and recruiting. Brown isn’t predicting a revolution as much as defining who has standing to make one. “In this country” matters, too: it rejects the notion that radicalism is foreign importation, casting rebellion as homegrown and owed. The subtext is a challenge to liberal narratives that frame racism as prejudice to be educated away. Brown’s framing makes it structural and cumulative, something that produces a shared political identity stronger than ethnic separateness.

Context sharpens the edge. As a leading Black Power voice in the late 1960s, Brown spoke amid urban uprisings, the Vietnam draft, COINTELPRO surveillance, and emergent Third World solidarity movements. His rhetoric mirrors that moment’s impatience: civil rights as petitioning looks inadequate; revolution as reallocation starts to sound like realism. The quote works because it converts anger into a map of alliance, and turns “minorities” from a category of vulnerability into a potential majority of leverage.