It seems to me that poverty is an eyeglass through which one may see his true friends.

What we need is to shift the focus from race and color to rich and poor.

With the book, what I didn't want was for my conclusion to be about blame. I wanted it to be about acknowledgement and remembering, because those were the things that came out of it for me. And the fact is, we hold in ourselves so many histories. Normally so much of the narrative around race is to try to make people feel bad, rather than to make them do better. And actually, I'd just prefer them to do better.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it's a great equalizer. White people come up to me and tell me that Roots has started them thinking about their own families and where they came from. I think the book has touched a strong, subliminal pulse.

Racial history lays so heavily on black people – slavery, migration, racism. But I don’t want my characters to be hidden by that…

You have to look beyond race because as a human being you have to experience the person from the inside first

I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope...

That’s what I try to do with Kelz – expose the racism that doesn’t sound like racism.

But in brief, as a child of a multiracial marriage who has lived in various countries with different histories of race and racism, and as a scholar and novelist for whom race and identity feature fairly prominently in my work, it’s safe to say that these issues are weighty, albeit not to the point of holding me back. Here again is where I take my cue from Baldwin, who advocates remaining committed to the struggle against injustices while keeping one’s heart free of hatred and despair.

When a book is explicitly about how marginalized culture and dominant culture interact, it’s much harder to stay detached and voyeuristic. If you’re white, for instance, you may end up asking yourself hard questions: “What do I think about how these white characters—who resemble me—behave? Do I act this way? What’s my place in the system?” You’re asked to think in terms of the larger picture, and you can’t pretend that a marginalized group’s experience is totally separate and other from yours—because, in fact, it isn’t.

I read everybody I can get to, and I appreciate the way "American literature" is being redefined now that the Black community is dialoguing without defensive postures, now that the Puerto Rican writers are coming through loud and clear, and the Chicano and Chicana writers, and Native American and Asian-American.

An all-too-common reaction to something like racism is to hate the act so much you dismiss the person. But in [American History X] you're forced to confront the complexity of the character and his tragedy - and the fact, which people don't want to recognise, that someone like him can come out of a normal middle-class home.