Mark Naison Quotations

When you're dealing with the entertainment business, a business that deals with marketing and ratings and profit, you have to be suspicious. You get ratings by touching on stereotypes, the titillating subjects people talk about their anxieties, fears, longings and desires. That's why hip-hop sells. But at the same time, I don't believe in censorship.

Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions.