“If you're calling for peace, I am not home.”

“I don't know any homophobic people. That suggests fear.The people I know who hate gay folks are:illiterate, nescient, uneducated, uninstructed, unlearned, unschooled, untaught, backward, benighted,...”

“There's an inexplicable joy that exists on a brown child's face and in the way they navigate their world long before they discover they're hated.”

“The heart will stretch a short love into long memories.”

“What you don't think about when you're planning for children is when you're going to teach them how not to be killed”

“I'm silent when there is a war inside me. There's a need to keep the people outside intact.”

“...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the s...”

“It was the freedom to experiment that made this experiment called Freedom possible.”

“I've never heard anyone come back from downtown Baltimore waxing poetic about the authenticity of poverty.”

“Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary bl...”

“I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your wo...”

“For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more ...”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”