Without external pressure, things might have gone very differently. That has always been true for African Americans; the better we've been at raising international awareness, the better off we've been at realizing solutions to our own problems.

Black Realism or cosmopolitan black politician is a code word to say this is a black person that is not tied to a civil rights/black power traditional black politics.

Not all of us are as effective as we could be, should be, or need to be, but some of the [most important] issues are slowly starting to be taken up again within black communities [because of their contributions], when we're not obsessed with personal attacks against each other.

Controlling for all the things that sociologists, economists, and political scientists say you should control for, we find that what drives one's views [most significantly] is race.

Whether we're talking about what the role of the government is, what you think of the United Nations, political leaders or how to respond to [Hurricane] Katrina and whether it had anything to do with race, across a wide variety of issues we see differences between mainstream black and white American opinion that dwarfs anything in American public opinion, period. Democrat versus Republican, men versus women, conservative versus liberal, the black/white divide is the biggest, one of the biggest in the world, and certainly the largest gap in the United States.

Without external pressure, things might have gone very differently. That has always been true for African Americans; the better we've been at raising international awareness, the better off we've been at realizing solutions to our own problems.

One of the things we've lost as blacks in the United States is imagining different ways the world could be organized, how this country could be organized, how politics could be organized.