If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill. The World War II generation, though, wasn't going to take it.

Criticism shouldn't be a performance that upstages the work it's talking about.

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

It's not nothing when you're abroad and you don't have a washing machine.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.

Freedom is having real choice. This offers a limited amount of choices. This is participating in a very imperfect system that we're desperately hanging onto, that we don't want to see further eroded.

Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

I can see Obama trying to be the president who suggests solutions for everyone who has experienced economic hardship.

I think at the beginning of one's writing life, negative reviews are what one does to get attention and stake out your territory. It's also often a mistake.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.