You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.

Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.

But there are a number of attitudes that should not be emotionally or psychologically ingested by young people.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.

The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.