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."

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

There are things that you can do on an individual level, even as you continue to fight oppression systemically, that make things a little bit better for an identifiable group.

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

The issue of redistribution of resources and wealth needs to resolved systemically, but in the meantime but there are individual spots you can occupy. There are things that you can do on a daily basis that will make a difference in moving the needle in individual lives. When we look at the mentoring of young black kids, for instance, the number-one mentor group is white women. I think after that maybe it's black women, and then white men, and then black men. We can make all kinds of arguments about that.

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.

If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except, however, as your experiences are pressured by empirical investigation of complex phenomena. I suspect that even when you control for variables of individual laziness, you'll see that what you see before you masses of black poor people unwilling to work hard to get better will not be as simply concluded as you might at first believe. Continue your good work.