I Have No Plans To

It Is The Black Poet Who Bridges The Gap In Tradition, Who Modifies Tradition When Experience Demands It, Who Translates Experience Into Meaning And Meaning Into Belief.

Really, The Values Under Which My Generation Was Raised In The '50s Were Immigrant Values Even Though We Weren't Immigrants. The Greatest Thing You Could Be Was A College-educated Negro.

In America There Is Institutional Racism That We All Inherit And Participate In, Like Breathing The Air In This Room - And We Have To Become Sensitive To It.

We Really Invented The Genre Of Tracing Family Trees And Going Back As Far As We Could On The Paper Trail. When The Paper Trail Disappeared, We Used Dna Analysis. The Technology Was Just Being Invented That Allowed You To Trace Ancestry Through Dna.

So When You Do Your Family Tree And Margaret Cho Does Hers, And... Wanda Sykes And John Legend... We're Adding To The Database That Scholars Can Then Draw From To Generalize About The Complexity Of The American Experience. And That's The Contribution That Family Trees Make To Broader Scholarship.