Hip-hop has globalized a conception of blackness that has had a political impact, whether or not it had a political intent.

The demand for racial (and sexual) justice gets reduced to politics of identity - and excoriating the so-called perpetrators of the identity politics.

I went to the library and began to read some stuff on my own. My discovery of James Baldwin was life-changing. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain first, and that was hugely impactful.

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

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.

Social media itself is not protest. To tweet is not to protest physically. To do a Facebook post, and though it's critical and crucial, is not to show up and embody the anger you feel, to embody the righteous outrage you feel, to embody the concern you feel. This is about putting feet to pavement and to register in the consciousness of America that this is something that's problematic.