Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it's just a few idiots. Isn't. It's the country.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I think there's a sort of, you know, very thin way of reading this that says, well, Barack Obama is biracial thus that gives him some understanding of both white America and black America, but that's not really it.

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.