The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.

A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

Joel Chandler Harris, who created a multi billion dollar industry, everything from his books, to Disney's "Song of the South" based upon the Uncle Remus stories. He got his start by transcribing the stories of slave Informants. I'm sure that none them got a dime.

Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.