We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society too.

Congressman Berg will repeatedly talk about Harry Reid and Barack Obama and I find it interesting because this morning when I woke up and brushed my teeth I looked in the mirror and I did not see a tall African-American skinny man. So let's make it clear that my priorities are North Dakota priorities.

It's a privilege to serve the poor to be servants of noble Africans but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That's where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film TV theatre in order to make it accessible to people.

This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.

We need somebody who's got the heart the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

During the days of segregation there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.

An old African leader says about leadership he says that leadership should never be shared it should always remain in the hands of the dispossessed people. We will lead the revolution.

Take for example the African jungle the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old the sick the wounded the weak the very young but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey you had better be strong.

Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!

Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

We have our own history our own language our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.

Let's face it - think of Africa and the first images that come to mind are of war poverty famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations which in their day were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?

From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent and even here in our own hemisphere our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.

Really the potential for first of all any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today particularly African Americans. With a college degree today you really breach the unemployment rate.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

I'm not a prophet I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy just allowing myself to tell jokes allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

I have run two Olympic 'A' standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context brilliant African father he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness a deracination.

African women in general need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength and to be liberated from fear and from silence.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.