The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

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.

Bigotry is surely an exportable American commodity, especially when it comes to race.

I was born in '58, so the riot in Detroit in 1967 was a memorable introduction to the issue of race and how race made a difference in American society. And then the next year, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. And the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series. All of that made a huge impression on my growing mind.

We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.

The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

I've been a social gospel-er and a person who sees politics as a central dynamic to the encoding of religious rhetoric.