We should all be about the business of finding, discussing and furthering solutions to our problems. But none of that can be done without at first speaking honestly about the problems we confront, with whoever in our ranks will listen and respond.

You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr., and not think of death. You might hear the words 'I have a dream,' but they will doubtlessly only serve to underscore an image of a simple motel balcony, a large man made small, a pool of blood. For as famous as he may have been in life, it is - and was - death that ultimately defined him.

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

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity of excavation, of archiving and curating, but also exploring, and understanding afresh and learning for the first time what it is that we need to know, and what the limits and boundaries are, and what the themes and preoccupations should be, and what the redemptive character of that erudition is. I find myself in the exciting position of doing all that, and at the same time having the obligation to explain to white people what the deal is.