If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.
While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.
Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.
I travel to Chicago a lot. And I've followed Obama through his Senate race and beyond. I found him to be an exceptional candidate who was able to transcend ethnic and racial lines.
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
The richness of America is that we are diverse. We're not Sweden. We're not Norway. We are a great American experiment. And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don't confront the real racial realities that still persist.
After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home.
Some black women hug me and walk away. A lot of black men talk about dating white women and how they've been there, too. People open up about their racial experiences. I feel like I'm a walking therapy session. It's quite intense. But it means a lot to people.
Any time you have people of different races in a movie that's about America, there's going to be a racial component.
The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black - a first in human history - has had no impact on what are called 'racial tensions.'
They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.
It's hard enough to be a middle-school kid, because you're dealing with so many facets of your identity - you're changing socially, you're changing physically, you're changing emotionally, everything is in flux, and to put race on top of that as well and have to figure out your racial identity is extremely hard.
Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.
Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of 'racial tensions' is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.
The first time we ever used the Dixie flag for our backdrop was actually when we went over to Europe in 1970. It looked good, so we all liked it. We never meant any racial things by it.
Feminism is rooted in racial rights and gender rights, and all of those things intersect, and to say that that's not something you can stand behind - it confuses me. I think it's a really great word.
We are not race blind. Of course we still have racial tensions in this country. But the United States of America has made enormous progress in race relations, and it is still the best place on Earth to be a minority.
The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.
When journalists and politicians speak of a dwindling middle class that's under economic assault and a poor community that's getting bigger, they're talking about Ferguson. Independent of the racial demographics and dynamics of Ferguson, Missouri, there's a 'Ferguson' near you.
When judging a horoscope, it is of prime importance that we take into consideration the social and racial standing of the individual, for configurations which are of great significance in the horoscope of an educated Caucasian may mean little or nothing in the figure of a Chinese Coolie and vice versa.
Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.
Racial humor was about 35% of my act when I first started. But I realized that it was a crutch. What brought it home was when another comedian said to me, 'If you changed color tomorrow, you wouldn't have any material.' He meant it as a put-down, but I took it as a challenge.
We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King's success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.
I don't know if it's a racial thing or not, but it's hard for the Roundtrees to talk about health issues. People have to get over all that stuff.
The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.
The more I've been able to learn about gay rights and equal pay and gender equity and racial inequality, the more that it all intersects. You can't really pick it apart. It's all intertwined.
Racial relations in this country are plummeting. Racial strife is rising. All the while, Obama is out there talking about unity and bringing us together.
Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.
I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.
Racial profiling is illegal, and I do not support it.
We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.
I think it's certainly important that we don't have symbols in our society that are offensive to a segment and that arouse racial division.
People must realize that a crime motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice against one group is a crime against all of us.
#BlackLivesMatter has raised the bar in our national dialog: Addressing economic inequality is necessary but not sufficient. It is also necessary to directly confront racial injustice.
We need to have a more thoughtful, two-sided conversation about racial issues in this country.