You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.

Music's cyclical. There's always that next generation that always comes along.

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.