President [Barack] Obama's choice of Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff was questionable, and perhaps coverups around the police violence against black people in Chicago is reflective of Mr. Emmanuel's values.

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.

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.

People will be talking about the [Barack] Obama legacy for decades, and I wanted to include my voice in the analysis of this presidency.

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.

Voting is not the most you can do; it's really the least you can do.

Always firmly believing in a higher power, I have also always been in search of a spiritual peace.