Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

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

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

That kind of peer learning, that peer teaching, that peer evaluation, and then administration of insight.

It's not enough to be against something.

We need all the newfangled web-based Internet spread, you know, social media that can catalyze, you know, some serious consciousness about what's going on. But we also need people on the streets pounding the pavement to make a significant and dramatic appearance to suggest that what's going on here is unacceptable.

I've written a lot of other books and this book [Tears we cannot stop] was different. I couldn't just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach.