Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

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

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.

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

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