The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.

I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk.

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.

Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you. And when they fail you in these ways, it signals a larger understanding about who you are as a black person in the world. It's not just a little failure for me. Its something exposed.

I’m not investigating race as much as I’m investigating intimacy.