Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.

American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.

We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.

The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

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.