I Have No Plans To Slow Down.

In A One-hour Documentary, You Can Tell Maybe Ten Stories. That's How The Documentary Is Structured. I Wrote To Forty Of The Greatest Historians Of Both African And African-american History, And Hired Them As Consultants. I Had Them Submit What They Thought Were The Indispensable Stories, The Ones They Felt This Series Absolutely Had To Include.

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.

The Act Of Writing For The Slave Constituted The Act Of Creating A Public, Historical Self, Not Only The Self Of The Individual Author But Also The Self, As It Were, Of The Race.

I Believe In The Law. I Think We Have A Great System Of Justice. But I Do Think That System Of Justice Has Been Corrupted By Racism And Classism. I Think It's Difficult For 'poor People' - Poor White People, Brown People - To Be Treated Fairly Before The Law In The Same Way That Upper-class People Are.

Learning To Sing One's Own Songs, To Trust The Particular Cadences Of Own's Voices, Is Also The Goal Of Any Writer.