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" The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic. "

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" Puerto Rico is complicated. The people are complicated. The history is complicated. The story of the United States' relationship to Puerto Rico is complicated. "

" The size of the city and the nature of how independent the neighborhoods are means that not only do people who live outside Chicago not know what is going on there, Chicagoans often don't know what is going on there. "

" I was born in the Bay Area because my dad was a semi-professional photographer and poet who was really into John Coltrane. He's had many lives. My dad's a capitalist to his bone, but he's also a human to his bone. "

" I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean 'weird' in their slogan 'Keep Portland weird.' "

" The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party. "

" You don't get smarter by not learning stuff. "

" America loses so much of what defines it if you subtract the Chinese influence. I know this because I spent 12 years living in one of America's most popular tourist destinations: San Francisco. And it would not be one of America's top tourist destinations without Chinatown. "

" Whenever I tell people in Berkeley, Calif., where I live, that I'm headed to the beach in Alabama, they are shocked. Most people outside of the Gulf Coast have no idea that Alabama has beaches - even though if you look at a map of Alabama, there is a part of it that looks as if it should belong to Florida. "

" I've turned the annoying questions that white people ask into a career, so I understand that's where I live. "

" The Olympics are great, but they only truly mean something when the moments that come out of them are bigger than the individual sports. "

" As a black man, I actually had naturally sort of comedic curiosity about the Klan. "

" For some people, the definition of who is and who isn't an American defies logic, historical accuracy, common sense, decency, good manners, the milk of human kindness, enjoyment in the good things in life, and love of good food. "

" When I was starting out, I was just bringing a garbage bag of jokes onstage, pulling them out like, 'What about this? No? Alright.' I was just trying to be funny about anything. "

" My dad and stepmom live in Mobile, Ala., and spend their vacation time an hour's drive away in Orange Beach, Ala. This means that, throughout my life, I have regularly vacationed there as well. "

" One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America's most segregated cities. "

" People always want narratives to be clean and easy. "

" Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind. "

" Most people have the ability to turn their empathy engine back on, but there's such a seductive burn to not being empathetic. "

" Since its inception, the government has broken and coerced treaties with hundreds of Native American tribes. And this is even worse when you realize that the native peoples of this land are negotiating for land that is, by all common sense and elementary school logic, their land. "

" Cops should not be separate from the black community or any community. Their salaries are paid for by the communities they police. They should be working for the communities they police. But as we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, they are not always doing that. "

" Comedy can be very deep sometimes. "

" Even if the KKK isn't the outsized presence it once was in this country, many of its principles and ideas are alive and well. "

" Usually, the news out of Florida makes me feel like being black in Florida can be a terminal condition. "

" Chicago is a world-class city filled with amazing people with big ideas. "

" Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars? "

" No comedian grows up thinking, 'I hope one day to have a show on CNN.' "

" That's how to make a stand-up comedian: You take a person who is uncomfortable and try to squirrel their way out of it through humor. "

" When things aren't going well for black people, they blame the government. When things aren't going well for white people, they can't blame the government because the government is supposed to be for them. So they blame black people. "

" When Arnold Schwarzenegger was pronouncing it 'Cal-LEE-fornia,' he was right - he just didn't realize he was accidentally speaking Spanish. "

" There's no religion in this country that is more misunderstood, mis-categorized, and misidentified than Islam. "