We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people.

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere.