Optimism is evidence-based.

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.

Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center.

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

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

I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful.

I recall coming across a line by the late Charles Tilly when he said, "The conditions for the possibility of social movements have been called into question in the twenty-first century." And I said to myself, my god, a society in history without social movements, for me, is very difficult to live in.