My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

In the old days, you lived in one neighborhood, you knew all your neighbors and your daughter married the guy next door. That was social and economic progress. That model is gone now. We also had a world order that was fraught but fairly stable.

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.