I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you.

I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here." And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.

I don't really agree with the role model thing. People are always saying that athletes shouldn't do X or Y because they are role models.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.