“The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.”

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.

America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

We live by the paradigms we know.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.

Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.

The industry looks for white actors and actresses, but it’s not the same for black actors. We have to really put the work in.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people – to black people.

My job is to be the constructive awakener of the black masses of the world so them know themself and others know what black people suppose to be and where.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

You are never too old to have a revelation.

Don’t worry about the Black Panther Party. As long as you keep the beat, we’ll keep on going.