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The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

Racism built me into a person that was set up to be self-destructive.

You face racism in small and large ways.

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?

I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.

I think people believe that I give ant aura of someone who has both feet on the ground.

Slow, skinny, and an utter countryside coward: I lived in dread of nettles, spiders, and the very sound of a wasp. As a victim, I was beneath the dignity of the bullies in my year but fair game to the ones in the year below.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.