As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.

The book, 'Citizen,' begins with daily encounters, little moments, places where language reveals how racism determines how we interact.

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.

Probably I chose immortality because mortality is a universal human obsession.

I actually used to make these little plays. I would stand there, and I would act out where I was dying or something. I would make them sit there and watch all my plays. I would be talking in gibberish language, like I was talking in a different language, and my parents would be like, 'Oh that was great!' and I'd be like, 'Wait, it's not done!'