The effect of reparations would be among the most devastating the country and the black community have ever experienced.
Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.
Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.
When the citizens of Baltimore banded together to repel the British during the War of 1812, three in five were immigrants, and one in five was black - some were free, some slaves.
I started at Howard in the drama department. At the same time, I was a fledgling member of the Black Repertory Company in Washington, D.C. When I graduated, I had the great fortune of being in the Los Angeles production of 'For Colored Girls'... And all these years since, I've done stage work.
The album 'Hoodie SZN' is about the result of where I come from: it gave me this black heart. And the black heart represents depression.
If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves.
The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.
I knew marriage was not the answer to changing the conditions for poor, black, queer folks. So I never felt compelled to get married - it just didn't seem important. But even if marriage wasn't right for me at the time, or a quick fix toward black empowerment, I found it repulsive that loving same-sex couples were refused the right.
The Republican Party just isn't held in high repute in the black community. Under Bill Brock we were reaching out to broaden the base of the party. We have to go back to that.
I resent that I have to prove that I'm black.
I have to show off my struggle so that people accept that I'm black. No matter that every single room I go to, I'm usually the darkest person there... I kind of resent that mentality. I'm just an individual.
When the culture is strong, you've got this consistency where black people can grow up in these places with this voice just resonating about our special-ness in the universe. And I always say you're in trouble if you get too far away from that core that grounds you.
Back in his Chicago Senate days, when he was seeking greater black credibility, Obama was happy enough to attend the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ.
In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.
I was bullied at school. The black girl in Central Falls, Rhode Island, in 1973. There'd be 8 or 10 boys; I would count them as I was running.
I don't know about England so much, but in Germany and some of these other countries, the pink was something that they liked. For those kids, the pink and black and the whole look with the sunglasses and the leather jacket was the right kind of hero they could get behind, and I think that really set me apart from everyone else.
We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the '60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.
'Empire' deals with the black experience, the human experience, sibling rivalry, what it feels like to be ignored or doted upon by a parent, illness, death. There are so many things that I think the audience can identify with.
Every black man in Chicago walks through the world differently, and I think what young black boys do is observe, and that's what gives them their road map.
