“The thing is probably twice true in this respect, that given the Negro writer, we are necessarily aware of a special situation in the American setting, making us sometimes forget that there is really very limited expression in literature which is not protest. I can’t imagine a contemporary writer any place in the world today who isn’t in conflict with his world. We are doubly aware of it because of the special pressures of being a Negro in America.” This is from a play by Adrienne Kennedy called “Sun.” “Yes, the position of my blood vessels, the blood vessels in my face, a nude man with arms stretched out, my lungs, my main arteries a branch of blackberry.” “As we identify who we are, we begin the journey to use that power. It is what empowerment is all about. Power that is not used is dangerous. If I do not use my power, however relative it is, someone else is using it. The power you do not use is being used against us.” For 100 years or so, we’ve been dependent upon — I might say it — an elite here in New York. They’ve been choosing tokens since the 1920s. Talent is not rare. Talent is common. No longer do the people in this town have the power that they used to do. “Remember that we are acted upon, and so we have to work very carefully not to become pawns and act out poor imitations of ourselves as written by somebody else. Let us take Langston Hughes’s idea and write our own poetry. Be inventive and bodacious enough to invent ourselves, not let the white man invent the black man.” White people, they seem to have other sorts of desires for what black literature ought to be like. We ought to mention a lot of food, the sweet potato pie and the pain. It’s really a perverse sort of situation where people are like, ‘Oh, you’ve been through so much that my people put you through.’ ‘You’ve done so many things to overcome the things my people did to you.’ There are a lot of voices that I think I have to block out in order to hear my own voice. “The one thing that I’m an expert on is, of course, me. So I have to take that stuff and use it, weave it. We don’t only write about ourselves. We use ourselves to illuminate something that we really believe and we really feel.”