There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

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.

For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.

In that chocolate side of town, in my blessed city of Sacramento, California - that was beginning of my death shudders, that's why Kierkegaard and Kafka began to make sense to me when I was very, very young - that radical sense fragility of life and inevitability of death; those trucks coming, if the truck came at a same time I was on the bridge, I was in the creek -my body would be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

It's clear that he was incredibly courageous in his critique of white supremacy, wealth inequality, and imperial power as it relates to war in particular. But it's easy to deodorize Martin King, to sanitize or sterilize him. And I simply want to reveal his radical love and his radical analysis as what they really were.

We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.

There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.