It is fun, I learned, to stroll around with Spike Lee and to gauge other people's reactions. Everyone recognizes him.
It is mind-blowing to pause and think that a film as forward-facing and potent as 'Do the Right Thing' was released the same year as 'Driving Ms. Daisy.'
Martha's Vineyard is a very strange place, racially speaking. Or maybe it's the way things could be if everyone had a bit more money and job security and status and could meet on equal enough footing.
I love being a foreigner.
I do think that some form of reparations for the descendants of American slavery would go a long way.
We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the Internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's 'Aleph.'
Poverty destroys Americans every day by means of confrontations with the law, disease, pollution, violence and despair.
In this post-post-racial, post-Obama era of resurgent populism and Balkanized identity politics, it really does feel as though it matters - and matters more than anything else - whether you're black or white.
I am not immune to Oprah's charms, but President Winfrey is a terrible idea.
The ideal post-Trump politician will, at the very least, be a deeply serious figure with a strong record of public service behind her.
If the first year of the Trump administration has made anything clear, it's that experience, knowledge, education and political wisdom matter tremendously. Governing is something else entirely from campaigning. And perhaps, most important, celebrities do not make excellent heads of state.
The problem is, authentic hip-hop culture is street culture. And so you've got middle-class blacks really emulating the norms of the South Bronx, which is not really in their best interests.
The truth is that ideas matter... If we really want to repair what is wrong in our society, it is going to require not just new policies or even new behaviors, but nothing less heroic than new ideas.
Almost every summer, my wife and I, now with two kids in tow, spend a couple of weeks in Italy.
What has changed immensely in America since 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, is the relentless demonization of nonwhite immigrants, economic migrants and asylum seekers from the highest levels of institutional authority.
Mobs in the street tearing down Ulysses S. Grant statues is a really chilling sight.
New York is actually a pretty safe place, and I think invoking the Bronx as a metaphor for the nightmarish urban environment is no longer spot on.
Until black culture as a whole is effectively disentangled from the python-grip of hip-hop, and by extension the street, we are not going to see any real progress.
BET was a touchstone for me and a lot of my friends - it was a place you could go to see exactly what being black in 1992 and 1996 was like and what it was supposed to look like.
The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.
