Growing up in inner-city neighborhoods, there's a particular structure, which I'm sure is true of most social contexts. The type of person you are determines the role you play.

My stepdad didn't have a father growing up, so he didn't know how to have a father-son style conversation. Plus, we had a tense relationship in which he never really offered me advice.

My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.

Moving forward, hopefully the platform my career has given me will allow me to continue to be a voice in culture, whether that's doing lectures on campus or writing books or whatever that looks like. I feel like that's really the lane that I uniquely connect with.

The people that have inspired me the most were dancers and choreographers. Even growing up, if I dealt with any pressure to be a certain way, I knew that as an artistic lane, dancing was the one that was a little more freed up - like, no one in my family is really doing that; I can be that person.

I'm not a tech-savvy parent. I communicate with my children via the old-media format called yelling.

I don't want to stick a sticking plaster on it, I don't want to fix children once the system's broken them, I want to give every child the opportunity before that - because the system should protect and nurture, and not damage our children.

As big as the industry is now and as gargantuan and stretched out with as many buses and trucks as there are now, it is still a big old dysfunctional family in my mind.