It's No Surprise That White People Say

Precisely That, Covering 500 Years Of African-american History In Six Hours. I've Been Working On This For Seven Years. The Biggest Challenge Was Deciding Which Stories To Tell.

My Brother And I Had A Really Privileged Relationship With My Parents... They Treated Us Like Adults.

Thousand Years Ago, We All Descended From Africans Who Left The Continent. Those Ancestors, We Will Never Know Their Name. We Can Go Back 200 Or 300 Years And Actually Populate Your Family Tree With Real People Who Had Names And Documents. They Had Customs, Characteristics That, Unbeknownst To You, You Have Inherited. Almost Through Osmosis It Has Been Passed Down To You.

All Historians Generalize From Particulars. And Often, If You Look At A Historian's Footnotes, The Number Of Examples Of Specific Cases Is Very, Very Small.

You Have A Diasporic Black World, And The Only Way To Put It Back Together Again Is Symbolic. It's Like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever Could Edit The 'encyclopedia Africana' Would Provide Symbolic Order To The Fragments Created Over The Past 500 Years. That Is A Major Contribution.