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.

Sometimes, Barack Obama is Martin Luther King, sometimes, he a black militant from the Sixties, then he's a Baptist minister. He can be so different. There's not yet an Obama voice.

What the Clintons have always done is embraced challenging. They can't have enough photo opportunities with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. They communicate to blacks that they agree with their challenging identity. So, in a sense, Hillary is blacker than Barack Obama. Their alignment with this black identity makes them 'black' in a metaphorical sense, I guess.

Liberalism has become a moral vaccine that immunizes people against stigmatization.

I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my views became more conservative. But my group is liberal. Not only that, they say, 'If you're not liberal and not a Democrat, you're not black. If you're conservative, you're a sellout.' Here, then, I'm living with that kind of a pressure against my individuality.

The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

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.