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.

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.

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.

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

My individuality is my gift to my people.

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.