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

I wrote a piece in the New York Times back in the Nineties saying that racial discrimination ought to be a criminal offense, not just a civil one. I'm all for the criminalization of discrimination.

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.

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

No matter how accomplished we may be, just any little white person can come up and say, 'Well, you wouldn't be here, if it weren't for Affirmative Action.' You put power in white people's hands, and then they use it against you. It's a trick bag.

My problem with Obama is that he's not a new paradigm; he's an old paradigm. A new paradigm would be somebody like Harold Ford [former Democratic Congressman from Tennessee] or Michael Steele [former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland], no relation, both of whom present themselves as individuals, and don't seem to wear a mask. They don't 'bargain;' they don't 'challenge.' So, I see them as fresh, and as evidence of what I hope will be a new trend.

Part of our identity is the idea that racism is still there and that we are vulnerable to it. So, the question is, 'How vulnerable?' In other words, is it really a problem for us, or is it just a small thing. How do you evaluate racism in America on a scale of 1 to 10? My suspicion is that most blacks overrate it a bit. Not to say it's not there, but we overrate it because this masking is part of our relationship to the larger society. This is a way we keep whites on the hook. We keep them obligated, and we keep ourselves entitled. There's an incentive, you see, to inflate it a little bit.