Remember, I Have A Ph.d. In English

I Want To Be Black, To Know Black, To Luxuriate In Whatever I Might Be Calling Blackness At Any Particular Time, But To Do So In Order To Come Out On The Other Side, To Experience A Humanity That Is Neither Colorless Nor Reducible To Color.

Mama And I Would Go To A Funeral And She'd Stand Up To Read The Dead Person's Eulogy. She Made The Ignorant And Ugly Sound Like Scholars And Movie Stars, Turned The Mean And Evil Into Saints And Angels. She Knew What People Had Meant To Be In Their Hearts, Not What The World Had Forced Them To Become. She Knew The Ways In Which Working Too Hard For Paltry Wages Could Turn You Mean And Cold, Could Kill The Thing That Made You Laugh.

I Think That We Need More Economic-based Solutions To The Problems Afflicting The Black Community, And I Think That That's A Way To Redefine Affirmative Action. I Grew Up With Poor White People In West Virginia, And I Know There's A Culture Of Poverty. I Know That I've Seen White People Perform Exactly The Same Pathological Forms Of Behavior As Black People Do When They're Systematically Deprived, Whether It's Getting Pregnant, Doing Drugs, Dropping Out Of School, Whatever We're Talking About. I Think That We Should Have Affirmative Action For Poor White People Too.

Politicians Will Not Put Forth Programs Aimed At The Problems Of Poor Blacks While Their Turnout Remains So Low.

There Haven't Been Fundamental Structural Changes In America. There's Been A Very Important Symbolic Change And That Is The Election Of Barack Obama. But The Only Black People Who Truly Live In A Post-racial World In America All Live In A Very Nice House On 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.