It is very difficult to sustain a high-quality relationship that has the kind of mutual intensity, that has a kind of mutual respect, without putting in time.
My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
We have to be self-critical even in context that we might be critical of, even as we – our pieces appear in it.
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice.
The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn’t even apply to them.
You can’t move forward until you look back.
I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it’s a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver’s seat regarding their lives.
Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.
The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It’s been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it’s been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.
Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist.
We’re learning lessons from Africa. And the lesson that we need to learn is, how do we straighten our backs up in the face of these oligarchs and plutocrats who are trying to snatch the best of our democracy away?
I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.
I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever.
When black America is on the move, America is on the move.
It’s no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.
There’s no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.
There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one’s mind that warrants freedom.
Part of the challenge of the Barack Obama campaign was to try to neutralize that white backlash, and of course, he was masterful in doing that.
I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years “Be successful, be successful, be successful” as opposed to “Be great, be great, be great”. There’s a qualitative difference.
And when I talk about love, I’m talking about something that’s great, though, brother. I’m talking about something that will sustain you.