“The child arrives to life with little choice but to dress in the behaviors available. We are all mothered by culture and fathered by experience. These are the molds for all human social development.

When culture, our social school, is rendered crippled, and experience, our sensory calculator, registers only unrelenting emotional pain, children have little chance to develop into balanced, well-equipped, and emotionally healthy adults.

The first, immediate, and most important transmitters of social culture and providers of nurture experience are our parents. They cannot give more, however, than they have been given themselves. When the root is damaged, so must be the branch. This was slavery and racial oppression’s long-range promise to a contemporary generation of spirituality and economically impoverished African-Americans.” -Randall Robinson