People have been unhappy for a long time about the two-party system.

Obviously these conditions [violence, poverty] predate the [Barack] Obama presidency and the president has limited ways to dent this violence. But funding war weapons in cities, as opposed to more community policing, is not the solution.

I always want to read something about our people's enslavement near the 4th. To keep it light, I also read Rolanda Watts' "Destiny Lingers" She is a sisterfriend and I ran into her at Essence. Then, I finished Paul Taylor's "The Next America." Taylor is the Executive VP at the Pew Research Center, and he uses their excellent data base to talk about the coming "generational showdown" which we are experiencing, at some level, in Black America.

While people are prepared to talk about Social Security, about marriage equality, about any number of other issues, people are not prepared - your layperson is not prepared to have a conversation about foreign policy.

This was in 2004, and it told me that President [Barack] Obama intended to be very careful and noncontroversial in addressing race matters. I

One of the challenges, I think, is that Americans are not sufficiently vested in foreign policy.

References to everybody just disturb me, and it also disturbs me that the people who make policy are not the same people who live policy. When we talk about everybody, we are leaving a whole lot of bodies out.