I hope [white brothers and sisters] read this book [Tears we cannot stop] and engage with it, but other white people have a better chance of speaking more directly to the white folk they know, because they're less likely to be subject to ridicule. They're insiders, so to speak.

..And the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.

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.

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

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.

The beauty of the literary art, the grappling with the black church, the wrestling with one's identity in the bosom of a complicated black community that was both bulwark to the larger white society as well as a threshing ground, so to speak, to hash out the differences that black people have among ourselves.

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.