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 t….

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 st….

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of ….

Each individual has a responsibility to get out of bed, learn their ABCs, learn your math tables, not use race and racism as an excuse..

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own parti….

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you c….

I thought, "why don't we be innovative and create something nobody had ever done before?" It was a huge hit and we immediately did a sequel with Chri….

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave sh….

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence..

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black..

It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people..

My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stori….

So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them thr….

You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your ….

People are afraid, and when people are afraid, when their pie is shrinking, they look for somebody to hate. They look for somebody to blame. And a re….

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind o….

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black gu….

I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when y….

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….

I think literacy is everything..

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it..