There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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

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.

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

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.

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

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.