I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.

And so the question becomes, what you do in the meantime? And you go - if you're forever on the move, especially in the life of the mind; forever reading veraciously, writing, speaking, lecturing, trying to unsettle minds, trying to touch souls, trying to encourage and inspire, on the one hand, but also trying to unhouse and unnerve people, so that they have to reexamine themselves, society and the world on the others. There's tremendous joy in it.

We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

We have to be self-critical even in context that we might be critical of, even as we - our pieces appear in it.

I think in the end, you know, we're just addicted to oil. We've got to overcome that addiction, and we need some serious accountability of big oil, because big oil, like so much of big businesses, has just colonized our government, colonized the regulatory agencies so we can't impose any kind of accountability on them.

To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation.