We have laws on the books. If somebody's discriminating against you, I strongly advocate suing them. That's the most effective thing you can do in terms of fighting racism. People understand that they're vulnerable to lawsuit.

If you are a minority, it is important that you have legal ways to defend yourself in the society in which you live.

Barack Obama's strategy is to get away from anything having to do with race as quickly as he can. His fear is that that might open a Pandora's Box.

I grew during segregation in an all-black segregated neighborhood with segregated schools, etcetera. I was raised by a great father, my hero, who I much admired. So, I never really had anxiety in the way that someone like Obama would have. When he walks down the street alone, since no one knows who his mother is, they're just going to see him as a black guy.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation's past.

Whatever I'm doing, I try to write well. I try to give the reader a nice, clean well-written surface, where the writing is transparent. It probably takes me longer to write things, but it's very important to me that the writing itself be good.

Most important, [research on affirmative action] has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites - the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.