We have to understand and explain to each other what blackness is.

I think it's extremely important to challenge white brothers and sisters and think more systematically and strategically about the whiteness that they possess.

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.

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.

Donald Trump amplifies the worst instincts. And his nationalism is really a white racist supremacist nationalism.

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.

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.