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

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

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

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.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

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.

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.