In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

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.

Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

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.

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

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.