Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.

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.

I do believe that it is quite necessary for us as a people to reach back, over and down to help the less fortunate of our number.

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

The language of faith is crucial because it affords human beings the privilege of intimacy with the ultimate.

I believe in a God of a second chance and a God of love and mercy, because I need so much more of it myself.