Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.

My ambition didn't grow out of nowhere. It was planted in me by a community that nurtured me.

Blackness also has positive dimensions, those that bear the political meanings of African American people, among other blacks, who have struggled for self-determination and freedom for centuries. The absence of such an identity doesn't automatically guarantee that we will be free of the images and ideals that fuel stereotypes about black identity. Changing the name will not alter the reality.

What the left ends up missing is that politics have always been at the heart of American culture; it's been a white identity that's been rendered invisible and neutral because it's seen as objective and universal. As a result, we don't pay attention to how whiteness is one among many racial identities, and that identity politics have been here since the get-go.

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.

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

I'm just challenging white supremacy at its intellectual heart every day. It's a pedagogy that I deploy against some of the most vicious resistance to blackness that whiteness is able to throw up. I engage in a lot of intellectual combat with supremacists and with the predicate of white supremacy and white indifference to black identity, and brown and red and yellow identity too, for that matter.