I wanted to identify that the black experience is American experience.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.

I knew they were my people, but it didn't feel like it. I was pushing against any first-generation narrative, while all the people in that area were seemingly proud of it. Aunties wore salwars to go grocery shopping, and little kids had those silver or gold bangles we were all given at birth...We were different from them, and I was determined to keep us different. Every piece of gold jewelry ever given to me was hidden in my dresser; I refused to wear any of it, because it made me feel I was being marked as an Other. (I now wear all of it, sometimes at the same time, a signal to other Others that I'm an Other too.)

Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.