American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

It's always seemed to me that black people's grace has been with what they do with language. In Lorrain, Ohio, when I was a child, I went to school with and heard the stories of Mexicans, Italians, and Greeks, and I listened. I remember their language, and a lot of it is marvelous. But when I think of things my mother or father or aunts used to say, it seems the most absolutely striking thing in the world.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

There is really nothing more to say - except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

What I'm doing ain't about hating White people. It's about loving us.