You can read this quote from the song “Hard Knock Life” (1998), and more quotes by Jay Z, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read the quote in its full context here.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.