Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation's history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.

Where does a black soul go to rest?

Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people.

I got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.

I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.