Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

Change comes from listening, learning, caring and conversation.

We used to say in the black community that if somebody else caught a cold, we caught pneumonia.

On immigration, there are a lot of hurdles before anything arrives at the White House.

I just think we as consumers of information media must be very clear what it is we are consuming. Whether we are choosing to get our information by listening to people fight about it. Or whether we're choosing to get it by listening to the facts or watching the facts as they're laid out and then reaching our own conclusions. It's very different ways of info gathering, but it's not all journalism.

In the media universe we're in, where there are people screaming on one end, there is no problem at all with having a little bit of extra politeness.

I actually think agendas are more often found in State of the Union speeches than in inaugural speeches.