If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except, however, as your experiences are pressured by empirical investigation of complex phenomena. I suspect that even when you control for variables of individual laziness, you'll see that what you see before you masses of black poor people unwilling to work hard to get better will not be as simply concluded as you might at first believe. Continue your good work.

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new.

The issue of redistribution of resources and wealth needs to resolved systemically, but in the meantime but there are individual spots you can occupy. There are things that you can do on a daily basis that will make a difference in moving the needle in individual lives. When we look at the mentoring of young black kids, for instance, the number-one mentor group is white women. I think after that maybe it's black women, and then white men, and then black men. We can make all kinds of arguments about that.

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 think that Michael Jackson, just as an entertainer, as a figure who embodies the contradictions of Black identity, and the possibilities of R&B music in the '70s and '80s will continue to be one of the most recognized and formidable human beings that we've ever produced in our tradition.

When Dr. King was murdered, I had no idea who he was. But as soon as I heard his words on television that night when I was 9 years old, I was dumbstruck, awestruck by their power.

Furthermore, the financial and social investment in prisons means that black and brown youth become, essentially, fodder for the machinery of capitalized incarceration. The steady supply of guns in the U.S. makes an already untenable situation even more dangerous, and all of us must raise our voices, write to Congress, hit the streets in protest, attend budget meetings of local municipalities - all to state our opposition to such criminal procedures and practices for our youth.