The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.
In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you’re doing but the importance of why...
I wasn’t fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn’t punished, but broken of my unconditioned reflexes. I wasn’t loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and i...
I missed my father driving us back from the Pomona State Fair, elbowing me awake, the Dodger postgame on the radio as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes just in time to see that sign, DICKENS-NEXT EXIT,...
Both dudes wore khakis whose baggy leggings spilled over two pairs of Nike Cortez sneakers so fucking new that if they had taken one shoe off and placed it to their ear like a conch shell, they'd hear...
The Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the local...
That there’s something about the craziness that he had to go through that’s kept me relatively sane.
L.A. is about space, and here one’s self-worth comes from how one chooses to navigate that space. Walking is akin to begging in the streets. Taxicabs are for foreigners and prostitutes. Bicycles, skat...
I fuck like an overturned guppy.
During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in...
And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the m...
You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesbur...
When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for...
That crap about being better off under slavery is too much even for you, isn't it, Foy?''At least McJones cares.''Come on, he cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about football. He has...
Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I'd have been better off. I wouldn't have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn't have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when a...
One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!
Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swi...
During social studies, otherwise known as Dad's cirriculum as the Ways and Means of the Indefatigable White People, my father used to warn me about listening to rap or the blues with Caucasian strange...
Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between guilty and innocent. Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be neither or both...
This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a dr...