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0c371ed
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Who was I kidding? I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living..
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Paul Beatty |
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aedfb27
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I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.
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blacks
jail
justice-system
race-relations
incarceration
innocence
justice
prison
guilt
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Paul Beatty |
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52076e8
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Like the good Reverend King I too 'have a dream' but when I wake up I forget it and remember I'm running late for work.
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Paul Beatty |
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7b2629f
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Tu dormis, tu perdis ... You snooze, you lose.
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Paul Beatty |
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6fe03be
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There should be a Stage IV of black identity--Unmitigated Blackness. I'm not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn't sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed. It's Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Alfre Woodard, and the serious black actor. It's Tiparillos, chitterlings, and a night in jail. It's the crossover dribble and wearing house shoes outsid..
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Paul Beatty |
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2274968
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The real question is not where do ideas come from but where do they go.
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Paul Beatty |
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5c923e1
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Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he'd never heard a patient of color talk of needing "closure." They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping fo..
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Paul Beatty |
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d210f83
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Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.
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Paul Beatty |
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67ab822
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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 message.
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Paul Beatty |
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30c3806
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It's corny, but I think poems are echoes of the voices in your head and from your past. Your sisters, your father, your ancestors taking to you and through you. Some of it is primal, some of it is hallucinatory bullshit. That madness those boys rapping ain't nothing but urban folklore. They retelling stories passed down from chicken coop to apartment stoop to Ford coupe. Hear that rhyme, boy. Shit, I could get down and rap if I had to. MC B..
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Paul Beatty |
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3fa36ac
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Your daddy doesn't know his assonance from his elegy! And he calls himself a poet.
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Paul Beatty |
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0611f8d
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I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.
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Paul Beatty |
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3951b5f
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I don't care if you're black, white, brown, yellow, red, green, or purple.' We've all said it. Posited as proof of our nonprejudicial ways, but if you painted any one of us purple or green, we'd be mad as hell.
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Paul Beatty |
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fd54232
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That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity.
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Paul Beatty |
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aabaf7b
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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 locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolano's prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence.
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Paul Beatty |
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4400cae
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This whole city's a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America's deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I'll have you know, my sister's daughter is married to ..
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Paul Beatty |
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3695a0a
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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 Johannesburg ain't that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I'm not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office ch..
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Paul Beatty |
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80fb2da
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The face that feigns acknowledgment that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor.
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Paul Beatty |
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58f18ba
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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 and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I'm left-handed.
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Paul Beatty |
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364307a
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the reason they don't permit cameras has nothing to do with maintaining decorum and dignity. It's to protect the country from seeing what's underneath Plymouth Rock. Because the Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who's going to get fucked and who's getting a taste of mother's milk. It's constitutional pornography in there, and what did Justice Potter once say about obscenity? I know it when I see it.
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Paul Beatty |
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50cf594
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Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you've all made it.
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Paul Beatty |
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4a23d52
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I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.
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Paul Beatty |
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998b3ed
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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 intense levels of commitment.
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Paul Beatty |
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5ed19ba
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Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.
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music
humor
dj-blaze
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Paul Beatty |
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5b98cf7
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Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.
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music
humor
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Paul Beatty |
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68ab794
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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"?"
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Paul Beatty |
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f1a4499
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Sitting here on the steps of the Supreme Court smoking weed, under the "Equal Justice Under Law" motto, staring into the stars, I've finally figured out what's wrong with Washington, D.C. It's that all the buildings are more or less the same height and there's absolutely no skyline, save for the Washington Monument touching the night sky like a giant middle finger to the world."
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Paul Beatty |
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c22eaf6
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And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap.
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boogie-boards
gangsta-rap
rap
popular-culture
pop-culture
twentieth-century
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Paul Beatty |
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c8cfa44
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The only people discussing "race" with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedys and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endl..
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race-and-culture
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Paul Beatty |
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b1d0102
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I tried to read this book, Huckleberry Finn, to my grandchildren, but I couldn't get past page six because the book is fraught with the 'n-word'. And although they are the deepest-thinking, combat-ready eight- and ten-year-olds I know, I knew my babies weren't ready to comprehent Huckleberry Finn on its own merits. That's why I took the liberty to rewrite Mark Twain's masterpiece. Where re repugnant 'n-word' occurs, I replaced it with 'warr..
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Paul Beatty |
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c9dba60
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Sometimes just making yourself at home is revolutionary.
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Paul Beatty |
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b1b935c
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There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.
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Paul Beatty |
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01ccd4c
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My litmus test of compatibility is 'Tom Cruise.' I hate people who hate Tom Cruise, cultural automatons who at the mention of his name reflexively bridle and say the diminutive thespian and Theta level Scientoligist is 'crazy' and 'a terrible actor'. They hate him because he's easy to hate. They think that despising Tom Cruise's lack of personality and supposed lack of talent is somehow a blow against the bland American Anschluss of the res..
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Paul Beatty |
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70a9e1b
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Semper Fi, Semper Funky
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Paul Beatty |
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a9927d7
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One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function."
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Paul Beatty |
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06462f2
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Feigned or not, sometimes I'm jealous of Hominy's oblivousness, because he, unlike America, has turned the page. That's the problem with history, we like to think of it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
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Paul Beatty |
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1db70ec
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Money talks, bullshit walks ... Pecunia sermo, somnium ambulo.
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Paul Beatty |
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4b03e71
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Crip up or grip up ... Criptum vexo vel carpo vex.
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Paul Beatty |
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ed2e2fa
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At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how "presidential" the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the "presidential" silverback's name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in t..
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humour
slurs
racism-in-america
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Paul Beatty |
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d4c9b9b
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Bemoan being lower-middle-class and colored in a police state that protects only rich white people and movie stars of all races, though I can't think of any Asian-American ones.
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Paul Beatty |
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3637552
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The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way.
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Paul Beatty |
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c82a91a
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And this country, the latent hight school homosexual that it is, the mulatto passing for white that it is, the Neanderthal incessantly plucking its unibrow that it is, needs people like him. It needs somebody to throw baseballs at, to fag-bash, to nigger-stomp, to invade, to embargo. Anything that, like baseball, keeps a country that's constantly preening in the mirror from actually looking in the mirror and remembering where the bodies are..
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Paul Beatty |
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e1892dd
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They say a cigarette takes three minutes off your life, but good hashish makes dying seem so far away.
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Paul Beatty |
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1a83ce4
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In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that th..
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income-inequality
presentations
racial-relations
blacks
income
community
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Paul Beatty |