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

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.

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

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.

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

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 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.