White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.

My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.

The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.

He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was more than the sum of his artistic parts.

There is not a history of black intellectuals being allied with dominant forces to hold white people in social and cultural subordination for a few centuries. Second, the "our" of black folk has always been far more inclusive that the "our" of white folk. For instance, there would have hardly been a need for "black" churches if "white" churches had meant their "our" for everybody - and not just white folk. But "our" black churches have always been open to all who would join. The same with white society at every level.

I guess I'm a Luddite.