“I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House.”

[Barack Obama] grew up in Hawaii, far, far removed from the most, you know, sort of violent, you know, tendencies of Jim Crow and segregation. He wasn’t directly exposed to that. He was untraumatized.

You know, the thing I always think about, you get up early in the morning to go to work and there’s some dude outside drinking and you come home and the same dude is outside drinking hanging on the corner. And then this engenders a level of anger I think and a level of shame.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.

I don’t know how you bridge that contradiction, but I felt that Barack Obama was sincere. It didn’t feel like a line to me.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

I think the sad fact is, there’s a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman.

Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.

They’re right there waiting for it. A community of people who’ve been denied wealth, denied wealth-building opportunities, are right there. And the banks went right after them.

Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

Racism is, among other things.

I want to be really, really clear about this. It doesn’t mean that everyone or even the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump are racist or white supremacists or anything like that. But what it means is that it’s not a mistake that Trump began his campaign with birthersism .

I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

The symbolism was in – and this sounds really, really small, but it’s actually big for African-Americans – the symbolism was not in being an embarrassment, but to being a figure that folks were actually proud of.

Segregations, by which I mean people living in a certain area, was a planned system.

The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.

We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Don’t fear it. That pull between your heart and mind. It is trying to teach you. It is learning your language.

Letting go is actually the easiest decision we can make. We become so adapted to the weight of our heavy hearts that being light again is a foreign language.

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them.