Segregation is still linked to racial disparities of every kind. Where you live plays a significant role in the quality of food and the quality of education available to you, your ability to get a job, buy a home, and build wealth, the kind of health care you receive and how long you live, and whether you will have anything to pass on to the next generation.

Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.

Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work.

Public Enemy’s theme was Black collectivity, the one thing that had been lost in the post–Civil Rights bourgeois individualist goldrush. Over the years, rap groups had shrunk down to duos, but Public Enemy brought the crew back.

But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety.

Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture in inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society.

Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.

I remember cutting out any article I could find about the guy. At the party, he gave me a piece of something he had done. I cried, dude.

I'm glad that the book has been recognized by people that I work with, but I'm a little disappointed that it's not seen for what it is.