People are starting to understand the other side's perspective and that's where empathy can sort of begin - once you quit judging other people but just understand where they're coming from.

Just as important I believe, is Black America can look back at the show and say, "Wow, I think I now understand why a lot of white people were appalled at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson."

Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are.

People are starting to understand the other side's perspective and that's where empathy can sort of begin - once you quit judging other people but just understand where they're coming from.

My character [in This Is Us], Randall, was adopted. He'd never met either of his biological parents so he seeks out and finds his biological father after 36 years. So that's where we find my character at the beginning of the show.

Unfortunately I feel like a lot of the issues that the show [OJ Simpson ] was dealing with are still very much in the forefront of the American consciousness and the world consciousness today. Police misconduct was at the heart of the defense and Johnny Cochran did a masterful job at putting that defense at the forefront of the jury's conscience as opposed to the double homicide of Ron [Goldman] and Nicole [Brown Simpson].

I have . . . a deep concern with the development of a literature worthy of our past, and of our destiny; without which literature certainly, we can never come to much. I have a deep concern with the development of an audience worthy of such a literature.