QUESTLOVE: We were in North Carolina and a friend of mine took me to a soul food spot. And southern cuisine is rather pricey now, caviar-level expensive, whereas the origins of southern soul food cooking was as scraps off the master’s table.

WEST: Leftovers. That’s right.

QUESTLOVE: I’m noticing that what used to tide us over, or keep us living, is no longer the standard of soul food. Michael Jackson’s musical director for the This Is It tour said that he would brag about how many ways he could remake grits for dinner.

WEST: Wow.

QUESTLOVE: In the inner city, take-out food is the new soul food. Chinese food now feeds the ‘hood. How is the cuisine that was formerly the lowest of the low—not fit enough for the big table—now the exalted, pricey standard? Are we losing our identity? What is our identity today when music is shared, worldwide, and food is unattainable?

WEST: We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification—be it of music, food, people, or parking meters. Capitalism will devour anything for a profit. Now, there used to be a time in which there was a concern about quality, there was concern about the long term, so you had investment, but now it’s all short-term gain and commodification. That’s a fundamental shift, and part of the “financialization” of capitalism, in which banks have almost twice as much a percentage of profits that they did 30 years ago. There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things. So what does that mean at the level of culture? It means identity is radically recast, more tied to markets, constituency, consumption patterns. And it’s all about the choice of the consumer. Now, on the one hand, it’s a positive thing, because you don’t want folks locked into eating grits all the time. It’s good to be cosmopolitan and get something from Ethiopia, something from Japan, something from Australia. The same is true with our music. We don’t want to fall into the trap of saying, “When you look at the present, you only see the worst. When you look at the past, you only see the best.” But the best is getting smaller. But this is true, not just in music, but in leadership, education—right across the board.

QUESTLOVE: What should we have learned from Ferguson?

WEST: We should learn that the vicious legacy of white supremacy is still operating. We learn that there are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three. Our public education is privatized, with big money at the top, so they don’t have resources for public education. The schools themselves get militarized, and the police are feeling more and more like an occupying army in the community. We are, as a people, among our poor especially, criminalized. They left Michael Brown’s body in the street for four and a half hours. The family can’t touch it, and then they take his body and throw it in the SUV. That’s a level of disrespect we don’t have a language for. You are responding to the militarizing attitude too many people had—not just police; white citizens have it toward black folk; many young black folk have it toward each other. We’ve privatized public life, public education, public transportation, public conversation-pushed to the side—it’s all privatized. For what? Big money. Where’s the big money go? Does it ever seep down to the poor? No. It goes up and hemorrhages at the top. One percent of the population owns 42 percent of the wealth; 22 percent of U.S. children live in poverty; almost 40 percent of children of color live in poverty. And the richest nation in the history of the world is a moral disgrace beyond description. The greed is running amok at the top. When you get all three of those together, you say, hmm, not just, “Here comes Ferguson,” but, “There’s going to be a whole lot more coming.”