A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.