Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just ….

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. ….

People from Europe and people from Africa encountered one another long before the invention of "Europe" and "Africa" and "white people" and "black pe….

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you l….

Home is the place where there is somebody who does not wish you any pain..

You can get away with anything as long as it works..

If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away..

When you are writing the kind of criticism you hope you're writing, everything depends on keeping your calm or your cool. You're trying to tell someo….

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine..

Hillary certainly needs the black vote, and Democrats need it. She's not doing anything too soon; she's raising her money and not wanting any issues ….

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with onc….

Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of povert….

When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You….

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better ….

Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. ….

What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-ly….

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a m….

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's pur….

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about..

There's a class divide in black America that doesn't seem to trouble black Americans so much, but whites use it and exploit it. The progress of a few….

Obama can't be everything to everyone. He changed. He did. I never thought I'd hear Obama say, "Let's go back to nuclear arms," but he did. In the me….