Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.
There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.
The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.
I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.
Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.
Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.
The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.
Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, and cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product.
What is toleration? It is the prerogative of humanity. We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: Let us forgive one another's follies, it is the first law of nature.
Donald Trump is, in effect, the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS. ISIS wants nothing more right now than to have the world divided into Judeo-Christian on one side and the Islamic world on the other. That's exactly what Trump is doing for them. I think it's time we start with thinking about what ISIS wants and then not doing it.
I've always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music.