All of us should be much more humble and contrite when we point the finger at somebody else, because four more fingers are pointing back at us.

I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.

I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents.

The demonizing of black identity is much more of a global phenomenon than many would like to admit. I've traveled abroad extensively, and it's hard to ignore the subordination of darker peoples to lighter peoples the world around.

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.

I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.

Whiteness itself is artifice, is fiction, is a construction, is narrative, is myth. And I seek to deconstruct all of that, to challenge the accretion, the intellectual accretion, the philosophical secretion that generates within the edifice of white supremacy that allows people easy escape, and egress. And I'm saying, "No, you can't leave now. You cannot afford to not know what I'm talking about, because you gotta be held accountable."