The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable..

Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it..

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle..

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender..

I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a….

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perf….

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that..

There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity..

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access poi….

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs..

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any blac….

Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock..

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective ….

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster….

Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together..

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is..

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues..

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without hav….

There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "O….

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives..

There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture..