You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.