Without external pressure, things might have gone very differently. That has always been true for African Americans the better we've been at raising international awareness, the better off we've been at realizing solutions to our own problems.

One of the things we've lost as blacks in the United States is imagining different ways the world could be organized, how this country could be organized, how politics could be organized.

Controlling for all the things that sociologists, economists, and political scientists say you should control for, we find that what drives one's views [most significantly] is race.

Not all of us are as effective as we could be, should be, or need to be, but some of the [most important] issues are slowly starting to be taken up again within black communities [because of their contributions], when we're not obsessed with personal attacks against each other.

Black Realism or cosmopolitan black politician is a code word to say this is a black person that is not tied to a civil rights/black power traditional black politics.