I was raised in a completely black world. In those days, if a white woman married a black man, she lived as a black woman, and that was just the end of it. So, I don't have a feeling of being bi-racial. I don't have a connection to it. People often come up to me thinking I do have a connection to it, and I kind of let them down because I really don't.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

My individuality is my gift to my people.

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.

Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites that has not yet been achieved in reality...Preferences tend to attack one form of discrimination with another...Affirmative action encourages a victim-focused identity, and sends the message that there is more power in our past suffering than in our present achievements.

I'm not going to play a racial game. With me, you're going to meet a guy named Shelby Steele, and you will have to get to know me as an individual. The color of my skin won't tell you anything. I think there's more and more of that in America.

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.