My job is to explain stuff you don't know or already know and have to unlearn. My job is to teach you stuff you don't know that you need to know, stuff you should know. I'm going to take what you already know and re-describe it.

Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby."

You must address the historical and political differences in race and ethnicity in this country before you hold tenaciously to insubstantial, and unsubtantiated, beliefs.

There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.

The only way for white folks to reclaim the full arc of their humanity, the full trajectory of their ethical content, of their ethical identity, is to surrender the white innocence that prevents them from being fully mature.

I knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur didn't start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.

I'm nervous about the prospects of an America that refuses to abide by its best conscience and its best lights and its best angels.