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.
Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world.
Dr. King’s Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups – a ‘Faces of America 2.’
Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike.
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as ‘Tarzan’ and in programs such as ‘Ramar of the Jungle’ and ‘Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.’
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating ‘Lincoln the myth.’ He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man’s president.
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 particular needs.
Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with.
Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.
If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you’re related to them. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it’s fascinating.
It’s very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you’re the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You’d get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.
There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I’ve heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room – and we have to become sensitive to it.
My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.
I didn’t feel particularly close to my father.