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.

The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.

For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose.

That's what I mean by being bilingual: comfortable in your skin, comfortable with all parts of who you are.