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6b19a97
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If Jean Valjean had me representing him," he likes to say, "then Les Miserables would've only been six pages long. Dismissed--Loaf of Bread Pilfery."
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Paul Beatty |
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069538b
|
What goes around, comes around ... Quod circumvehitur, revehitur.
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Paul Beatty |
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5c879a7
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Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, confounding roundabouts, marble statues, Doric columns, and domes, is supposed to feel like ancient Rome (that is, if the streets of ancient Rome were lined with homeless black people, bomb-sniffing dogs, tour buses, and cherry blossoms).
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Paul Beatty |
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fe13e21
|
The meetings consisted mostly of the members who showed up every other week arguing with the ones who came every other month about what exactly "bimonthly" means."
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Paul Beatty |
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4b88247
|
One if by Land Cruiser. Two if by C-class Mercedes. The bougies are coming! The bougies are coming!
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Paul Beatty |
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1adff6c
|
Listing hard to the right like a drunken seaman with an inner ear infection.
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Paul Beatty |
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7f32206
|
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 to care because what else would he be good at.
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Paul Beatty |
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61d4b92
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That there's something about the craziness that he had to go through that's kept me relatively sane.
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Paul Beatty |
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aa21677
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Marse Compton hadn't aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.
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Paul Beatty |
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0dadc53
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It'd taken only a few hours, but I felt like Michelangelo staring at the Sistine Chapel after four years of hard labor, like Banksy after spending six days searching the Internet for ideas to steal and three minutes of sidewalk vandalism to execute them.
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Paul Beatty |
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cf94874
|
Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin' Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn't know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn't long after that innovation that ..
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Paul Beatty |
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d9661cf
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Congratulations, you may already be a winner! Your case has been selected from hundreds of other appellate cases to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
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Paul Beatty |
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9b5c599
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The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus." "Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?" "White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway." "I don't know." Cuz took two deep swa..
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rosa-parks
the-henry-ford
artifacts
museums
whites
civil-rights
race-relations
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Paul Beatty |
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7cbca45
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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. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch. Foy
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Paul Beatty |
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bd5b67f
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All Vices and Bad Habits Referred to as "Phases" Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents, and Items Left in the Subconscious" --
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Paul Beatty |
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7d45540
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This traffic-court jester did more than tell jokes; he plucked out your subconscious and beat you silly with it, not until you were unrecognizable, but until you were recognizable.
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Paul Beatty |
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b242480
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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 swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction.
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Paul Beatty |
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35abb9c
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a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.
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Paul Beatty |
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c1f867b
|
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 strangers. And as I got older, I'd be admonished not to play Monopoly, drink more than two beers, or smoke weed with them either. For such activities can breed a false sense of familiarity . And nothing, from a hungry jungle cat to the African ferrybo..
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Paul Beatty |
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dec5458
|
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 the water.
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Paul Beatty |
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b23a234
|
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 from the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent.
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Paul Beatty |
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612d3b0
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because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.
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Paul Beatty |
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e6db1f8
|
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,
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Paul Beatty |
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b771364
|
Every race has a motto. Don't believe me? You know that dark-haired guy in human resources? The one who acts white, talks white, but doesn't quite look right? Go up to him. Ask him why Mexican goalkeepers play so recklessly or if the food at the taco truck parked outside is really safe to eat. Go ahead. Ask him. Prod him. Rub the back of his flat indio skull and see if he doesn't turn around with the pronunciamiento !Por La Raza--todo! !Fue..
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Paul Beatty |
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59cc2d9
|
Most languages have a word for the day before yesterday. Anteayer in Spanish. Vorgestern in German. There is no word for it in English. It's a language that tries to keep the past simple and perfect, free of the subjunctive blurring of memory and mood. I take out a pen, tapping the end impatiently on a bar napkin as I try to think of a English word for "the day before yesterday." I consider myself to be a political-linguistic refugee, come ..
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paul beatty |
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e9fb4a5
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I'm convinced that Nabokov wrote his novels around words like agglutinate, siliceous, gardyloo, ophidian, triskelions. That he took an ESL course at a local night school and the teacher wrote those words on the blackboard and said, "Today's assignment is to take these words and use them in a first novel the New York Times will call 'Riveting, truly a classic for the ages."
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Paul Beatty |
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670fc5e
|
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 America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma's palm, and walked off into the squall.
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Paul Beatty |
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01eb402
|
Your dad used to think I was bipolar, but what I really am is by myself.
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Paul Beatty |
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e455b09
|
In English you label groups of people by their moral intentions and collective needs. A mob tries to convince itself it's right and needs to prove it. A crowd knows it's right because if it weren't right, they would all need to be someplace else. A throng doesn't give a fuck about moral imperatives, it just wants and needs something to happen.
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Paul Beatty |
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83d3af8
|
Hominy got out of the car to untangle the snarl. Waving his arms like the crazy man he was, he separated the cars by color, not that of the respective paint jobs, but by the hue of the motorists. "If you black, get back! White, to the right. Brown, go around. Yellow, follow the sites and let it mellow. Red, full speed ahead! Mulattos, full throttle!" If he couldn't categorize by sight, he asked the drivers what color they were. "Chicano? Wh..
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Paul Beatty |
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4d9d7e4
|
He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American.
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Paul Beatty |
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b0e6674
|
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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slurs
racism-in-america
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Paul Beatty |
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f320736
|
One of the many sad ironies of African-American life is that every banal dysfunctional social gathering is called a "function." And" --
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Paul Beatty |
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c927714
|
No one has, because even in this middle age, he's sensitive, and if you say the wrong thing, he'll show the world just how sensitive he is by crying at your funeral.
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Paul Beatty |
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04223a6
|
She was thinking about how her middle-school alma mater was now 75 percent Latino, when in her day it was 80 percent black. Thinking
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Paul Beatty |
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878d883
|
I can think of a more despicable word than 'nigger'", I volunteered. [...] "Like what?" "Like any word that ends in -ess: Negress. Jewess. Poetess. Actress. Adultress. Factchecktress. I'd rather be called 'nigger' than 'giantess' any day of the week."
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Paul Beatty |
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d9a9da7
|
Winston knew better than to give a heartfelt synopsis of a grainy black-and-white film that had inadvertently touched his heart and caused him to empathize with a loafer-shod French boy, Doinel, the young, unloved Parisian, running toward the sea in the last reel. Winston had wanted to chase behind him, clasp him on the shoulder...
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Paul Beatty |
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dd1491d
|
Objection! This defendant, evil genius that he is, has through his abhorrent actions managed to racially discriminate against every race all at the same time, to say nothing of his unabashed slaveholding. The state of California feels that it has more than enough evidence to prove that the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964 and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth..
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history
humor
courtroom
law
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Paul Beatty |
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8a9cee6
|
It's like the specter of segregation has brought the city of Dickens back together again." I decided to give my new career as City Planner in Charge of Restoration and Segregation another six months. If things didn't work out, I could always fall back on being black."
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Paul Beatty |
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686c44a
|
Blood in, blood out ... Minuo in, minuo sicco.
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Paul Beatty |
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3dcfb21
|
Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I'm getting high in the highest court in the land.
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Paul Beatty |
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555305b
|
Yes, being black is a full-time job: sometimes you are invisible, other times you are hyper-visible," he says. "Sometimes you are welcome, other times you are not. The thermostat is always moving and you have to keep adapting to find some comfort level. Richard Pryor used to talk about going to Africa and people there telling him he was white. Even though he was black, he just wasn't black enough."
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race
modernity
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Paul Beatty |
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55237a5
|
I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.
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Paul Beatty |
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cffc039
|
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.
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Paul Beatty |