"…you can’t assimilate until you are something. Then you have something to give other people. My position is this: the universe, the universal, is beautiful, but if you imagine the world as a set of plates piled on each other, there’s this one that’s a little skewed because of a particular history in the New World: our history, that of the descendants of the slaves, is skewed, and it is at the bottom. And if you don’t settle that one, all the others will fall and crash. So that one has to be settled, has to know itself, so that it can take its place sitting firmly with all the other plates…It will continue to run away from us. People don’t know what it’s like, being snubbed for how you look, always being seen as the sniper or whatever. How can they know, unless we stick up for ourselves and say this is who we are."