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.

If your experiences suggest to you that poor black folk are lazy, then you must be true to those experiences - except, however, as your experiences are pressured by empirical investigation of complex phenomena. I suspect that even when you control for variables of individual laziness, you'll see that what you see before you masses of black poor people unwilling to work hard to get better will not be as simply concluded as you might at first believe. Continue your good work.

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

I don't think that an emphasis on the peculiar plight of black males at all suggests that others are not suffering, or that such attention suggests that black men and women feel sorry for themselves.

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.

I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.