Jimmy Santiago Baca

"The white kids are being conditioned to feel superior—so you can’t attack the whites, you have to attack the system. But we have to attack with loving ourselves first. If we don’t love more, we ain’t …"

"I was institutionalized from age five to thirty years, first in an orphanage and then in prison. I kept running away and escaping and escaping and escaping . . . I had tried to escape so many times. W…"

"People of color and poor people, we have a self-hatred that is somehow like a virus, and the second you come out of your mother’s womb, the virus comes to you—that if you’re poor, and you’re a person …"

"Not knowing how to read and write is only the top of that morbid state of being. Not knowing how to read and write leads to not knowing where windows come from, how cars are made, how people pay for c…"