You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations.

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

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

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

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

I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.