It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.

Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back.

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?

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

When we think of globalization we are thinking in part of structures and institutions that have been developed over time and that have allowed us to become more interdependent and interrelated. But the development, the extraordinary development, of those structures and institutions has not fundamentally transformed our humanity. We are still those animals with fears and anxieties and insecurities in the face of death and dread and disappointment and disease.

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century.