The Genius Is Making A Way Out

So When You Do Your Family Tree And Margaret Cho Does Hers, And... Wanda Sykes And John Legend... We're Adding To The Database That Scholars Can Then Draw From To Generalize About The Complexity Of The American Experience. And That's The Contribution That Family Trees Make To Broader Scholarship.

What People Forget Is That The Most Radical Thing About Obama Is That He Was The First Black Man In History To Imagine That He Could Become President, Who Was Able To Make Other Americans Believe It As Well. Other Than That, He Is A Centrist, Just Like I Try To Be. He's Been Bridging Divisions His Whole Life.

You Can Say I Had A Severe Case Of 'roots' Envy. I Wanted To Be Like Alex Haley, And I Wanted To Be Able To... Do My Family Tree Back To The Slave Ship And Then Reverse The Middle Passage, As I Like To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

I Think That We Need More Economic-based Solutions To The Problems Afflicting The Black Community, And I Think That That's A Way To Redefine Affirmative Action. I Grew Up With Poor White People In West Virginia, And I Know There's A Culture Of Poverty. I Know That I've Seen White People Perform Exactly The Same Pathological Forms Of Behavior As Black People Do When They're Systematically Deprived, Whether It's Getting Pregnant, Doing Drugs, Dropping Out Of School, Whatever We're Talking About. I Think That We Should Have Affirmative Action For Poor White People Too.

In Ethiopia, The Black People Became Christians 1700 Years Ago, Hundreds Of Years Before Northern Europe Turned To Christianity... And Here, Most Of The Saints Are Black.