I used to tell people when I preached at a church, 'If you want a great sermon, be a great audience.'

I guess I'm a Luddite.

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."

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.

I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.

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'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.