The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

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

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.