 My people were Yoruba, and their culture survived slavery...  My father found out about that when I was a kid, and it gave me all I needed to know that, hey, I was somebody, even if nobody else knew about it.When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people.And that's a terrible burden on black people, because they don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted."