I had an exciting, interesting childhood, to be sure, with all of the challenges that ghetto life provides - but had loving parents.

Blackness is not simply a reactionary title or identity; that is indeed the "negative" way of characterizing African American identity.

Gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator, misogyny, violence, materialism and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by most Americans. Indeed, gangsta rap's in-your-face style may do more to force America to confront crucial social problems than a million sermons or political speeches.

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

I don't think you can bury words. I think the more you try to dismiss them, the more power you give to them, the more circulation they have.

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.

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.