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Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.

Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

I remember sitting there on my father's couch or my mother's couch, listening to this lecture about how there were two groups and we had to be separated. We've come a long way from this kind of open racism. And I think it's wonderful.

For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

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.

Conversations between parents and kids are important - about race issues, about all kinds of things, about heritage.