I Didn't Feel Particularly Close To My

We Really Invented The Genre Of Tracing Family Trees And Going Back As Far As We Could On The Paper Trail. When The Paper Trail Disappeared, We Used Dna Analysis. The Technology Was Just Being Invented That Allowed You To Trace Ancestry Through Dna.

My Father, If Anything, First And Last, Was A Man Of Words. He Loved Stories; He Didn't Live For Stories, Exactly, But I Think He Lived Through Stories. I Think, Like Many Writers, He Loved Stories About Things He Had Experienced As Much As, If Not More Than, He Loved The Experiences Themselves.

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.

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.'

The Historical Basis For The Gap Between The Black Middle Class And Underclass Shows That Ending Discrimination, By Itself, Would Not Eradicate Black Poverty And Dysfunction. We Also Need Intervention To Promulgate A Middle-class Ethic Of Success Among The Poor, While Expanding Opportunities For Economic Betterment.