The stories I work on, especially for any length of time, do tend to become personal to me.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

The idea that humanity is divided into these separate and distinct and disparate groups with clear boundaries has been disproven by science a long time ago, decades ago. Humanity really is more of a continuum, and that people belong on the same continuum and there are no clear breaks between these so-called races.

We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about race. To my mind, it was more about telling stories of people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. Invisible people.

Most of us, when imagining an All-American, wouldn't picture a man who looked like me. Not even I would.