I Think Literacy Is Everything.

You Notice Patterns. White Guests Often Are Mortified - That Word Again - When They Learn Their Ancestors Owned Slaves. But I've Never Had A Black Guest Who Was Upset To Learn About White Ancestry That Probably Involved Forced Sexual Relations.

You Have To Have A Canon So The Next Generation Can Come Along And Explode It.

We Must Begin To Understand The Nature Of Intertextuality . . . The Manner By Which Texts Poems And Novels Respond To Other Texts. After All, All Cats May Be Black At Night, But Not To Other Cats.

I Use African-american, Because I Teach African Studies As Well As African-american Studies, So It's Easy, Neat And Convenient. But Sometimes, When You're In A Barber Shop, Somebody'll Say, "did You See What That Negro Did?" A Lot Of People Slip In And Out Of Different Terms Effortlessly, And I Don't Think The Thought Police Should Be On Patrol.

I Want To Get Into The Educational Dna Of American Culture. I Want 10 Percent Of The Common Culture, More Or Less, To Be Black.