My family has always had Cape Verdean pride but I don't think it was something the kids in the family necessarily understood. However, I was very conscious of the fact that both sides of my family were drastically different and my aunts, cousins, and uncles varied in different shades of brown.

The thing that I think a lot of guys need to know how to do is not take your mother's advice about honesty being the best policy. Listen to your cool, drunk uncle who tells you to lie. Those are the relationships that last.

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.

When it came to music growing up, it wasn't just gospel and R&B. My uncle brought rock 'n' roll to me when I was younger, and I loved it. I was open to all music.

In adolescence I started to find out about Robert Wilson because I saw Lou Reed's "Timerocker" at [the Brooklyn Academy of Music]. I started getting into Jim Jarmusch and knew that my uncle was a friend of his. I pieced together parts of his life in high school and college, which lead me to his story in a funny way.

I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?

My uncle used to sit me on his lap and play "ventriloquist", only I wasn't wearing pants.

Today's Uncle Tom doesn't wear a handkerchief on his head. This modern, twentieth-century Uncle Thomas now often wears a top hat. He's usually well-dressed and well-educated. He's often the personification of culture and refinement. The twentieth-century Uncle Thomas sometimes speaks with a Yale or Harvard accent. Sometimes he is known as Professor, Doctor, Judge, and Reverend, even Right Reverend Doctor. This twentieth-century Uncle Thomas is a professional Negro -by that I mean his profession is being a Negro for the white man.

When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil rights keeps you under his restrictions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket.

Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he's lost the battle.