Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn't change the old racial order. I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.

When somebody says the best thing you can do is be tough, the best thing you can do is use your brute force, then we're selling ourselves short.

I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

Let us nurture the practice of family values, by embracing policies that value families.

The right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged - and without which none can be protected.

In the USA, it's harder for a black man with no criminal record to find a job than a white man with a criminal record, which is to say that race is actually a bigger factor than ex-felon status. But if you're both, it's almost impossible to find a job.

In this nation, the greatest of all nations, there are no second-class families. That is our great American conviction.