"The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again."

"Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large."

"The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched."

"The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up."

"We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts."

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."

"The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular."

"The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa."