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.

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.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.