There is no conscious choice of heterosexual identity any more than there is a homosexual one. The last person in the world who wants to be homosexual, for the most part, are homosexuals.

I grew up in the church and began to recite set pieces at the age of four and five, like many of the other kids.

I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.

Black women must help black men understand their full potential lies not in denying black women full access to their humanity and opportunity, but in working diligently to overcome the odds that hamper our progress. Yes, some of that is self-imposed, and we must confront it; and much of it comes from outside. But without courageous and brilliant black women, our communities are greatly diminished.

We should all be about the business of finding, discussing and furthering solutions to our problems. But none of that can be done without at first speaking honestly about the problems we confront, with whoever in our ranks will listen and respond.

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.

Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.