Boots Riley Quotes

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

Sometimes, I feel that Manhattan in particular has gotten really tame and gentrified or something.

I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

I didn't grow up around all white people; I never wanted to gentrify hip-hop, I've never wanted to speak to an all-white audience.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

You know it's going to hell when the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

In the past Berlin was much more radical and extreme and now it's becoming much more of a conventional European city.

Everybody in the '80s, well, we hate rap. Now, the biggest rapper in the world... Eminem. Rap's a black thing.

Gentrification is what brings in all the money to the cities, but it also pushes some people out.

You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people.

A lot of white men in the music industry are promoting and participating in black culture in a way that is pretty careless. They want the currency of blackness, but they don't want the brunt that comes along with that.

People need to realize that because black people have been established in the U.S. for a lot longer than in the U.K., the culture's a lot more embedded. We will get there with how comfortable they are with rap in the mainstream, but we're way behind them.

Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.

There are things that are only palatable until they become uncomfortable for us, so it's very easy to complain about some problem the minute it becomes a problem for you. But you're okay with certain aspects of gentrification if they're the aspects you like.

I lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.

I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

America used to say that hip-hop was a cancer. Then it embraced that cancer and realized, 'Hey, this isn't a bad thing. It is part of us, just more America.'

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

I have lived in this city my whole life and have seen the way gentrification has changed it. I'm not necessarily against transplants, as 75 percent of my good friends, roommate, and boyfriend are not native New Yorkers.

We've got to help our community out. We've got to help Baltimore out, because it's a lot of things that have been handed down in our society that we're dealing with.

The thing is, getting rid of racism is a cultural thing that takes decades. It's not something we can solve immediately. Structural changes have to happen in our culture.

You have a huge demographic shift that's happening in America. Globally.