Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

Collaborating with the musical genius of our time in some ways with Prince himself - late, great Gerald Levert,all these are forms of singing education, what the Greeks call paideia,that deep education to get us to shift from superficial things to serious things, to shift from bling-bling to life and death to justice and pain and joy, those fundamental, elemental things that we must come to terms with as we make our moves from our mother's womb to the tomb.

And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Black people have been working hard for decades.

This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice.

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).