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My kids are coming up in a different time then me. Interracial couples are of the norm. With me, it's about making sure my kids understand the importance of education and having opportunities that I didn't. My goal as a parent is to make sure they don't take what they have for granted.

Kids - in a really good way - can talk about their differences without the baggage that adults have.

A people's relationship to their heritage is the same as the relationship of a child to its mother.

As kids, we had no clue about the racial stuff that seemed to preoccupy adults. We just enjoyed our life as kids.

I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

Perhaps the single most important thing for a child is to be with a loving, supportive family. And all things being equal, any child of any race should be placed with any qualified parents without restriction or special conditions.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don't want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don't want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

If a parent wants to talk about slavery or wants to talk about countries where bombs go off, they need to have a way - a setting - to have that conversation. And there are wonderful books out there for those kinds of conversations.