It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.