For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.

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.

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.

We've got the wrong vision, the wrong values, the wrong priority, and as the great prophetic figure Marian Edelman Wright puts it, we have been AWOL when it comes to poor people and poor children.

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution.