I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."

I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged.

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.

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.

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others.