We look at the legacy of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Martin King. We have, and part of the struggle now in the age of [Barack] Obama is how do we keep alive the legacy of Martin King?

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.

The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world.

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.

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.