“It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation’s police departments.”

You’ve got to make sure that people have the opportunity to work at a good job, they have access to good healthcare, and that they have the opportunity to build wealth over time.

The U.S. Constitution contains no right for a child to go to school, let alone for a child to go to a good school. And yet, we know that if they don’t go to a good school, they’re less likely to be able to realize all that this country has to offer.

I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.

In order to bring down the incarceration rate, you’ve got to start with the beginning of life. You’ve got to make sure that parents and schools are prepared to prepare young people for success. You’ve got to deal with the next stage of life.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

Let us invest less and less in war and tax cuts for the richest 1 percent, and more and more in jobs and schools for the other 99 percent.

White has always been an exclusive definition. I think one of the challenges for white people is to figure out how to have a more inclusive picture of who their families are, of who they are.

The right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged – and without which none can be protected.

When somebody says the best thing you can do is be tough, the best thing you can do is use your brute force, then we’re selling ourselves short.

As an American people, what is greatest about our history are the many times we have led this world away from hate, towards hope.

It’s a funny thing, in the US we all believe that we have a right to go to school. We have a right to a good education. And we don’t.

Race is a lie built on a lie. The first lie is that people are different, somehow skin color or hair texture is more significant than eye color, or the shape of one’s feet.

When you’re smart on crime, you start off by recognizing that both the victim, first of all, the victim, but also the person who did the crime are both human.

Civil marriage, like all civil rights provided by the government, must be provided equally to all Americans.

We really have to, as a country, recognize that school is where people get their identity not just as a scholar, or a future business person, but as a citizen. And we need to make sure that schools set them up for success as citizens.

What is happening now in Israel is that you have a coming together of Jews from the Christian world and Jews from the Muslim world with different cultures.

Families, friends and communities often find a source of courage rising up from within. Indeed, sadly, it seems that it is tragedy that often draws out the most and the best from the human spirit.

When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth.

I love business. I love helping urban communities grow. I love putting people to work of color. I love making sure – like right now the whole mortgage crisis, I want to help people get back into their homes.

I think it’s our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we’re able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn’s case, we as artists somehow made it ‘cool’ enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

A secure pluralistic society requires communities that are educated and confident both in the identity and depth of their own traditions and in those of their neighbours.