Obama sees the world in two ways: from the black perspective and from the white perspective. He was raised as a black man, whose culture he has self-consciously adopted. But he was reared largely by his white grandparents. He lived a kind of racially bipartisan experience, and he will be able to speak a language that resonates with both communities.

Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

I guess I'm a Luddite.

To challenge norms, presuppositions, practices in communities across this country - where the unconscious valorization and celebration of whiteness and conscious resistance to trying to grapple with black and brown and other peoples of color's ideas and identities - makes a huge difference.

White privilege allows a certain kind of leisure that can be deployed by white people of advantage toward our restoration. That's all true and good. But it also suggests that there is an individual approach to the issues that many of these white people have taken up as a recognition of their tie to and responsibility for some of the inequities that exist. And I don't think it has to be an either-or. I think it has to be a bifocal approach.

I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.