The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.

We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

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

None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. (p. 109)

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.