Creativity Quote by Kevin Eubanks

There is a quiet brutality in the verb choice: "lulled". It frames deprivation not as an external theft, but as a kind of internal anesthesia, something absorbed over time until ambition itself starts to feel unsafe. Coming from Kevin Eubanks - a musician whose career has moved through elite institutions and mass culture - the line lands as an unsettling backstage confession: success doesn't cancel the psychological training that racism can install early, even in people who "made it."

The intent is less self-pity than self-audit. "Sometimes I wonder" signals a musician's ear for nuance, the willingness to hear dissonance in his own story. He isn't claiming a single cause; he's asking whether desire got edited down to fit what felt permissible. The subtext is that America doesn't only limit Black opportunity through laws, hiring, or policing; it can also shape the range of wants that feel realistic, or even morally allowed. Wanting "too much" can invite punishment, ridicule, or danger. So the safest strategy becomes wanting less, or wanting quietly.

Context matters: Eubanks came of age in a post-civil-rights era that sold progress as a finished project while daily life kept delivering reminders that it wasn't. In that climate, self-management becomes a survival skill. The line exposes the hidden cost: not just missed doors, but a dampened appetite for walking through them. It works because it turns systemic racism into an intimate question, one that implicates the psyche without letting the system off the hook.