It was quite a process to narrow more than 400 columns down to 80. I write weekly, though, and I don't always write about President [Barack] Obama, so that was the easy elimination.

I serve on the Institute of the Black World's National Commission on African-American Reparations, and we have asked the President [Barack Obama] to, by executive order, establish a commission to study reparations. He can do this without Congressional approval. While I am not optimistic, I do hope that President Obama considers this in these waning months of his Presidency.

This is a column collection, or as one colleague called it, "history in real time," recounting my perspective on the highs and lows of this presidency from an African-American perspective. More than simply a column collection, the book has a substantial introduction that frames the [Barack] Obama presidency, explores the way Obama was treated by the political establishment and also how this first black president treated "his" people. In the epilogue, I use numbers to tell the story of African-American gains and losses during this presidency.

He was in Poland to participate in the NATO conference, President [Barack] Obama did respond well to the back-to-back killings, as well as to the attacks on Dallas police officers that followed.

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

The Task Force didn't produce any earth-shattering findings but it suggests that this matter is on the president's radar screen.

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