I get most my information about what's happening in the United States from reports and studies, which are often in conflict with what you read on the editorial pages, or handouts from right wing institutions like the American Enterprise Institute.

Regardless of the criticisms I receive from the left, the right and the middle, I think it's important to maintain a prolific writing jab, as long as my literary legs hold up.

I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague.

Hateful material travels the globe. A few years ago, CNN, America's Der Sturmer, ran a story about Black parents being so low down that they abandoned their children and the children had to eat rats. I was at a University in Wisconsin at the time and the mother of a student from South Africa called to see whether the story was true. She had seen it all the way over there. The story was untrue. The children lied. CNN never corrected the story.

Free enterprise is not a bad idea and has produced art.

During the last decades, films about the black experience have been produced, directed, and even scripted by white men. Some of them are excellent. But most reflect George Bernard Shaw’s warning that 'if you do not tell your stories others will tell them for you and they will vulgarize and degrade you.'

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.