The process of empowerment cannot be simplistically defined in accordance with our own particular class interests. We must learn to lift as we climb.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

We must always attempt to lift as we climb

I do think it's extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.

Human beings cannot be willed and molded into non-existence.

I believe profoundly in the possibilities of democracy, but democracy needs to be emancipated from capitalism. As long as we inhabit a capitalist democracy, a future of racial equality, gender equality, economic equality will elude us.

I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.