The thing that bothered me when I was in college was that I saw myself rejecting the way of life that got me to where I was.

Even as someone who's labeled a conservative - I'm a Republican I'm black, I'm heading up this organization in the Reagan administration - I can say that conservatives don't exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they're welcome.

Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960s, I’d still be in Savannah.

Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black.

But I know that the vote of 9 out of 10 black Americans for the Democratic Party or for leftist kinds of policies just is not reflective of their opinions.

It really bugs me that someone will tell me, after I spent 20 years being educated, how I'm supposed to think.

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.