We were raised very colour blind. I had gone to school and to camp for so long with white people, I think I was like 15 years old before I realised I was black.

College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.

I don't know that there is a, quote, 'hip-hop lifestyle.' I think the music responds to complex social issues and injustices; I think it also raises complex social questions.

My mother didn't set out to surround us with white students or colleagues. My mother just sought a quality education. People have these expectations of who they think you should be. And I say it's because they don't really understand Malcolm X - or his wife.

Everyone puts all of the advances that we've made on Dr. King, but there's a lot of people who were part of the civil rights movement.

After graduating high school, Betty attended the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, the alma mater of both her parents. My mother relocated to New York because she refused to accept the oppressive racism of the Jim Crow south.