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.

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.

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

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

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

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