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...
They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
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...
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...
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...
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...
True freedom is having the right to be a slave.
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...
Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself.
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...
Tu dormis, tu perdis … You snooze, you lose.
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...
The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.
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 just making yourself at home is revolutionary.
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!
Marse Compton hadn’t aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.