One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth.

The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.

I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.

You can't move forward until you look back.

The street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with.

There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.

Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition.