It's so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that's what is dangerous.

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

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.

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

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