My town was all-white and shut down Section 8 housing because they didn't want black people to move into the town. And I thought that was wrong - duh.

I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.

We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

I cannot speak adequately, especially considering my race and my privilege, to the violence of the NYPD or the police in racial terms. That is something that I cannot speak adequately to.

I think in short order all of us need to act like we are citizens with not only rights, but also duties.

I felt like there wasn't a political discourse. I felt like there was just one set of values, and any one set of values was wrong; that there should at least be room for conversation.

I had a sense that my mother was struggling, when I was a kid, working twelve hour days, making $12,000 a year with two kids in a trailer park.