For me, self-care is a lesson I'm still learning. But it begins with space away from the heaviness of life. I now take time to play, laugh, and, every once in awhile, sleep.

We live in a world where black humanity is a relatively new idea.

If you look at literacy tests in the South, for example, they were absurdly difficult and didn't measure literacy. They were simply measuring whether or not you were black. So at every moment when we've said, hey, we don't want certain people to vote because they are not educated enough, it is often simply become a way of excluding black and brown people.

We have to convince the white worker that they have something to gain by forming a solidarity politics with black workers because everything that's happened over the last three to 400 years in America has divided the white and the black worker.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it's Greece, Rome or the British Empire. It doesn't mean that America has to end. The country could be reshaped and reimagined in a way that is even more democratic and less imperial in nature. We're trying to radically reshape the nation in ways that are more just and fairer. That's what I mean when I say that empires eventually fall. I'm not calling for the end of America. I'm just calling for a reimagination of its democratic possibilities.

The truth is there are people who are quite informed who still vote against their interests. I would argue that, as a Green Party supporter, I would argue that middle-class black people are voting against their interests oftentimes.

I'm not defending the Trump vote. I think they're making a bad choice. But I'm saying the bad choice isn't one out of pure ignorance, and I think it's too easy. And it plays into cliches about, you know, elitist liberals to say, oh, these Trump voters - if they knew more, they would do better. And it's like, well, maybe they would do better if we had a legitimate set of policies in place that doesn't encourage the kind of gross radicalization that has happened under the Trump candidacy. So for me, it's all about developing a richer conversation.