I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

America is capable at single moments of receiving the depth and the breadth of the homiletical vision of black America when a black preacher rises to his or her craft at the height of his or her ambition and the desire to tell America the truth.

I've written a lot of other books and this book [Tears we cannot stop] was different. I couldn't just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach.

[The World Series] introduced me for the first time to a team with a lot of black players. Detroit had about three of them: I think it was Willie Horton, Gates Brown, and Earl Wilson - might have been one or two more in '68.

We need all the newfangled web-based Internet spread, you know, social media that can catalyze, you know, some serious consciousness about what's going on. But we also need people on the streets pounding the pavement to make a significant and dramatic appearance to suggest that what's going on here is unacceptable.

That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily.

What I'm talking about is both political and then also extra-political. Because what Donald Trump is doing is not simply to be measured in terms of its political effect. It's the very spiritual uplift of the nation. It's the very tenor and tone, morally speaking, of what this country is about. And so the unleashing of these fierce and ferocious beliefs have a potential impact that is quite deleterious, quite negative, quite destructive. And I think we have to say something.