My Father Was The Funniest Man I

There's A Boom In Genealogy Now. With Ancestry.com And Other Sites Digitizing So Many Of The Records, You Can Now Find Things In A Few Minutes That Used To Take Months.

But You See, Our Society Is Still Trapped In This Binary, Black/white Logic And That Has Had Some Very Positive Implications For Our Generation. It's Had Some Very Negative Ones As Well And One Of The Negative Ones Is That It Creates Enormous Identity Problems For People Who Have One Black Ancestor And All White Ancestors For Example.

If You Don't Tell Your Stories, Other People Will Tell Their Story About You. It's Important That We Nurture And Protect These Memories. Things Change. Existence Means Change.

I Give A Speech To The Black Freshmen At Harvard Each Year, And I Say, "you Can Like Mozart And Ice Hockey..." - And Then I Used To Say "golf," But Tiger Took Over Golf! - "and Picasso And Still Be As Black As The Ace Of Spades."

We Have To Stop Making Excuses. One Of The Things That I'm Careful To Show Is The Horrendous Effects Of Institutional And Structural Racism, But In The End, You Can't Wait For White Man Or A Black Man To Come Riding In On A White Horse To Save You. We Have To Save Ourselves, And That's The Lesson Of "the African Americans."