I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.

No other group has internalized its self-hatred as much as blacks have. It would be difficult to find other groups who behave similarly in that their most esteemed members berate its poorest members.

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.

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."

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.

I guess I'm a Luddite.

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.