"Among the questions the movie raises is whether black success within capitalism is something to reflexively celebrate or whether the success of individuals who belong to an exploited class serves to ratify and consolidate rather than thwart or ameliorate the system doing the exploiting. Discussing this question, Riley used the example of the resolutely capitalist Jay-Z: 'When people listen to Jay-Z, they're working all day or trying to work and pay their bills, and what they hear is someone who's free. Who doesn't have to worry about the electricity. But all we're taught is that those who are rich deserve to be rich because they worked harder than the rest of us or they're smarter. And this may be true of some of those folks, but there are definitely very poor people who are very smart and work hard. It's just that this system can only have a few people on the top. So Jay-Z is saying: "You can do this, too, I'm trying to give you game," and it ends up explaining poverty as a system of bad choices. Yes, maybe you can make better choices and be the crab that gets out of the bucket but that'll be at the expense of all the other crabs in the bucket."
