You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encycl….

It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that w….

If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith..

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'b….

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature..

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low..

Our society is driven today by so much ethnic discord. We have Black Lives Matter, which I praise and celebrate. We have the demagogues stereotyping ….

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experie….

Diversity doesn't mean black and white only..

For me, a garden is peace of mind. It immediately takes my mind off the thing I'm puzzling about in my work and gives me repose..

It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underc….

I have no plans to slow down..

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned i….

My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults..

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used ….

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black..

It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution..

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you sca….

I try to be sensitive, but the atmosphere I create is very supportive. One overriding premise of the series is that guilt is not heritable. It's good….

All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native Amer….

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be a….