The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.

But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism.

Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.

Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.

I think markets are mechanisms that determine prices that are necessary for mass heterogenous populations, and markets do generate levels of technological innovation and productivity that is crucial. But when unregulated, they often generate levels of vast inequality and ugly isolation that makes it difficult for people to relate and connect with one another.

The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.