Growing up in New Orleans, I was always the only black kid, or one of two, on the school soccer team. While I was always conscious of this status, what took precedent was my unfettered love of the game.

Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

For myself, if I am to stake all I have and hope to be upon anything, I will venture it upon the abounding fullness of God - upon the assurance that, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts.

Africa shall be saved.' I heard God's message so clearly. In response, my family moved from Lesotho to South Africa in 1974.