So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a real leader speaks to anxiety and to fear and allays those fears, assuages anxiety.

Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology.

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.

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.

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?