“Elizabeth [Alexander] is right, of course. It’s a stirring fact that our slave ancestors left behind not documents of property but an incredible amount of cultural wealth. It is a tragedy that we are only able to imagine their individual contributions to that collective wealth- and the worlds they might have made had they been free.”

“no human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world.”

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”

“Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.”

“The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.”

“Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.”

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”