White communities - and I exempt poor white communities from this - have power over their representation. White people have the ability to define themselves, to exert their agency in a way that they get to be believed. No one believes black people. No one. Until a white person vouches for them.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

The justice system isn't meant to work for people of color in this country.

Everyone in the street where I grew up was given the same message: You can be anything; you can do anything. That wasn't extraordinary; that was ordinary for us. My folks didn't believe in black exceptionalism. There's nothing exceptional about 'You can have that, too' - except when it comes to justice. You can't have that.

I have a day job, which means my family isn't dependent on the writing income. So if I have an idea I like, I write it.

I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there.

When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.

You can get out of maintaining property at code if the family is behind on rent.