Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.

I am in the position of judging people by the best they've ever done rather than the worst.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . . So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . . To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom

We're all surrounded by what I call faux language, fake language of commerce, of news media.