Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

If you're bored, your readers will be bored. If you're faking it, you won't get the kind of readers you want.

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.

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

Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the meantime, the clear and present danger is the Republicans in the Senate. A lot of politics isn't heroic, it's as day-to-day as our lives themselves. We always want to make the Byronic choices, but Byron himself was not Byronic all the time either.

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

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