Emerson was not passionate about abolition. He wasn't a passionate person. He was a cool intellectual, and I think he probably was a little uncomfortable with passionate people, but he was against slavery.

I'm a professional historian. I do my research. I have a PhD. What does my race have to do with it?

The American sense of the importance, the fundamental importance of the black-white dichotomy, comes out of societies founded in the era of the African slave trade, so societies like ours, that is to say the western hemisphere, the Caribbean and so forth, we share a lot in common.

Science is a truth that is true no matter what, no matter when and for all time and science as the kind of gospel truth replaces the gospel, which was religion.

Being a graduate student is no fun and is hard, but I'm sticking with it. I love making art.

In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States.

We live in a world in which it's harder to talk about the American in the singular, so we're a multi. We have several different people who represent the United States, so in that sense whiteness, the salience, the importance of whiteness is kind of tamping down some.