Popular literature and culture used to reflect people's aspirations, pain, and passion. All those particular things are no longer available to us.

[The strike in 1968] brought us together with teachers and also with progressive whites. All of us came from diverse backgrounds, but at the same time the reasons why we were at San Francisco State in the late sixties was because of the agitation and movement building that had occurred within our communities. We saw ourselves not separate from the community but intimately connected to it.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that.

Just look at the cinema itself: It's comprised of lots of movies about graphic novels, and if you're not 20 years old and wearing a cape and a mask and white, you're out of business. Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.

I didn't elect [Barack] Obama because he's a black; I voted for Obama because he was the right person at the time.

But rarely have I made choices that made me feel I was really compromising what I believe.