We can't exempt ourselves from the same moral calculus that we are willing to apply to others.

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.

The culture will not be able to persist in light of the rigid systems of its own innocence.

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

Tony Morrison said, 'Can't I love what I criticize, criticize what I love.'

I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.

I was trying to write a straightforward book of sociological analysis, or at least cultural criticism, and I failed.