If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.
I am proud to be in Los Angeles. I have a lot of fans that love me here. When you talk about the Meccas of boxing - Las Vegas, New York - now you have to talk about Los Angeles.
But when you talk about the education and you talk about the lack of recreation for kids to do, I mean, it's second to none in New Orleans when you talk about the lack of opportunities for young people. And it's not just black kids, it's white kids. It's Asian kids. I had Vietnamese kids in my class that had lack of opportunities.
We're doing a bunch of shoots with kids about the election, about politics, about racism. I like to talk about heavy topics with kids because you find out what their parents are feeding them at home, and then you find out their quick reactions to things. It's so refreshing when kids are so honest.
When we talk about public education, we don't worry about a district. We don't focus on an individual school or a building when we talk about education. We talk about kids and what's best for kids. It doesn't matter what's best for the adults; what matters is what's best for the individual kids.
We want to bring the kids, the parents, the grandparents and grandkids together, we want them to have a shared viewing experience. We want the kids to talk about it in the playground, dad to talk about it down the pub, grandma to talk about it while she's out shopping.
What happens at the average church or synagogue or mosque is that I don't know many priests or ministers or rabbis who say to their congregation, 'go home and talk about the religion at the kitchen table with your kids...talk about God, talk about what this is all about.' They say in general, come back on the weekend, we'll talk to you about it.
For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
A lot of comedians get a bad rep once they have kids and that's all they talk about, and people are like, 'I don't want to hear about your kids!' I'm like, 'Prepare yourselves. That's all I'm going to talk about.'
There are just certain things you can't talk about with kids. I just totally do not believe in this sort of Bart Simpson character who infects so much of our literature and film and TV stuff nowadays, these know-it-all kids who seem to understand the hypocrisy of the adult world so thoroughly and can talk about it with such articulateness. That's bunk. Kids are kids; they're innocents, they really are. For a long time, no matter what they see, no matter what they're exposed to, they can't get it until they have developed enough.
Advertisers have become scared of talking about certain issues because they don't want to upset an American family. I think it's a shame because there are things we want to talk to our kids about. So to be able to talk about LGBT issues on our shows. To be able to to talk about sex on our shows. Now if you're like, "I'm going to do an episode talking to kids about sex," on a network that's hard to do!
On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!
When we talk about total war, and we talk about war zones, and we talk about the breakdown of the cities, when you exclude questions of race from that discourse, something disappears that's really central to the forms of repression that we're talking about.
When people talk about South Africa, it's all about lions and elephants. But when we talk about India, we talk about tigers.
I was reluctant to talk about my kids on the blog. I kept telling myself, "People aren't coming here for stories about your kids. They want to hear about the upcoming books, writing advice, conventions..."
The French talk about education, the education of their children. They don't talk about raising kids. They talk about education. And that has nothing to do with school. It's this kind of broad description of how you raise children and what you teach them.
I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I'm going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don't have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too.