My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak.

Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.