"They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class"
About this Quote
A blunt refusal to accept the language of hierarchy, the line asserts that class labels are tools of division rather than descriptions of shared struggle. H. Rap Brown, a leading voice of Black Power and a former chairman of SNCC in the late 1960s, spoke during a period when the civil rights movement was shifting from appeals to inclusion toward demands for self-determination. His rhetoric consistently targeted not only overt racism but the subtler strategies by which power maintains itself: co-optation, respectability politics, and the promise of individual advancement that isolates people from collective action.
The pronoun they names a familiar coalition of forces: politicians, media, philanthropic gatekeepers, and institutions that benefit from a stratified society. By sorting people into middle and lower class, these forces encourage suspicion and aspiration in place of solidarity. Those who climb a rung are told they have more in common with the status quo than with their neighbors; those left behind are framed as problems to be managed. In the 1960s, that dynamic surfaced around the War on Poverty, urban uprisings, and the creation of a growing Black professional class. Movement organizers worried that gains for a few would blunt the urgency of transformation and soften the critique of structural racism and capitalism.
Brown’s insistence does not deny material differences; it reframes them. The point is to recognize a common vulnerability to the same systems of policing, economic exploitation, and political exclusion, and to refuse the narratives that pit communities against themselves. The cadence of cannot is performative, a rallying claim that unity is both possible and necessary. It diagnoses divide-and-conquer as a tactic and prescribes collective identity as its antidote.
That insistence still resonates. Whether through consumer status, job titles, or zip codes, contemporary society offers countless gradations meant to separate people. Brown’s challenge is to see those gradations as instruments of control and to build alliances strong enough to render them irrelevant.
The pronoun they names a familiar coalition of forces: politicians, media, philanthropic gatekeepers, and institutions that benefit from a stratified society. By sorting people into middle and lower class, these forces encourage suspicion and aspiration in place of solidarity. Those who climb a rung are told they have more in common with the status quo than with their neighbors; those left behind are framed as problems to be managed. In the 1960s, that dynamic surfaced around the War on Poverty, urban uprisings, and the creation of a growing Black professional class. Movement organizers worried that gains for a few would blunt the urgency of transformation and soften the critique of structural racism and capitalism.
Brown’s insistence does not deny material differences; it reframes them. The point is to recognize a common vulnerability to the same systems of policing, economic exploitation, and political exclusion, and to refuse the narratives that pit communities against themselves. The cadence of cannot is performative, a rallying claim that unity is both possible and necessary. It diagnoses divide-and-conquer as a tactic and prescribes collective identity as its antidote.
That insistence still resonates. Whether through consumer status, job titles, or zip codes, contemporary society offers countless gradations meant to separate people. Brown’s challenge is to see those gradations as instruments of control and to build alliances strong enough to render them irrelevant.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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