Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

No white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.

There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.