In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.

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

One of the joys of reading is the ability to plug into the shared wisdom of mankind.

Constance L. Rice, co-director of the Los Angeles of the Advancement Project, told the Times that Seltzer might have been influenced by David Simon's fake ghetto series, "The Wire." It figures. Isn't this sexism? Isn't this a double standard? They're hard on this young woman for her fake ghetto book, yet praise these White guys for theirs. So there's a big market in downing Black men.

I use non-fiction work written by Whites in my research. It's indispensable. That wasn't the problem. I said that "The Wire" was a cliché! It's like my writing a series about Jewish life and casting all of the characters as inside traders.

I'm beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of deathamong Americans. What you don't know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright's character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.

The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency--indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman--but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.