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67885bb
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the "bystander effect": the more people around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn't apply to black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into my ear canals, a hip-hop ..
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Paul Beatty |
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43ad790
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jalapeno peppers snapped in half and ground into our lips for saying "fuck"
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Paul Beatty |
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4846138
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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 drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic..
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Paul Beatty |
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49aee3b
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I suppose that's exactly the problem--I wasn't to know any better.
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opening-lines
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Paul Beatty |
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e5d9d2b
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But anyone who'd ever been to Tito's Tacos and tasted a warm cupful of the greasy, creamy, refried frijole slop covered in a solid half-inch of melted cheddar cheese knew the bean had already reached genetic perfection.
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Paul Beatty |
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00a2905
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Founded in 1868, Dickens, like most California towns except for Irvine, which was established as a breeding ground for stupid, fat, ugly, white Republicans and the chihuahuas and East Asian refugees who love them, started out as an agrarian community.
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Paul Beatty |
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487b39b
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I think about my own silence. Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it's fear. I guess that's why I'm so quiet and such a good whisperer,
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Paul Beatty |
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3987872
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any day when he could personify American primitivism was a good ol' day. It meant that he was still alive, and sometimes even the carnival coon in the dunk tank misses the attention. And this country, the latent high 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, ..
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Paul Beatty |
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5c4f755
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Sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living.
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Paul Beatty |
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d29f364
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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 roar of an ocean of sweatshop labour.
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Paul Beatty |
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cc8f4cc
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Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.
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Paul Beatty |
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d1fdc5d
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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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3f739ed
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Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourist aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to se..
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pentagon
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Paul Beatty |
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6dd3217
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These are the women my father warned me about. The drug-and-asshole-addled women who sit in the dark, hard up and lovesick, chainsmoking cigarettes, phones pressed to their ears, speed-dialing K-Earth 101 FM, the oldies station, so they can request Nina Simone or the Shirelles' "This is Dedicated to the One I Love," aka "This Is Dedicated to Niggers That Beat Me Senseless and Leave". "Stay away from bitches who love Nina Simone and have fag..
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Paul Beatty |
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36e8a60
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But today I'm all medulla oblongata and I can't concentrate.
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Paul Beatty |
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1e0d66b
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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, and know I was home. Shit, I missed that sign. And what are cities really, besides signs and arbitrary boundaries?
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Paul Beatty |
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edb75dc
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Satyajit
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Paul Beatty |
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7ed55b6
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For those looking to find the thing that you've lost, the decision of where to place your handbill is one of the toughest you'll ever make in life.
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Paul Beatty |
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d4e2534
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And like that black president, you'd think that after two terms of looking at a dude in a suit deliver the State of the Union address, you'd get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do.
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Paul Beatty |
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9c15e24
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In neighborhoods like the oneI grew up in, places that are poor in proxy but rich in rhetoric, the hollies have a saying - I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.
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inspiration
life-philosophye
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Paul Beatty |
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bf1a77d
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That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. "The Ku Klux influx." But when I'd ask him how, he'd just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol' days."
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Paul Beatty |
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425539a
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Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo. And
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Paul Beatty |
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5a926ab
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true freedom is having the right to be a slave.
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Paul Beatty |
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4cefd43
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Sometimes I'd chance across an elderly member of the community standing in the middle of the street, unable to cross the single white line. Puzzled looks on their faces from asking themselves why they felt so strong about the Dickens side of the line as opposed to the other side. When there was just as much uncurbed dog shit over there as here. When the grass, what little of it there was, sure in the fuck wasn't any greener. When the nigger..
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Paul Beatty |
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e343176
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That's the problem with this generation; they don't know their history.
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Paul Beatty |
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172f660
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When the mind experiences a power surge of stress and bullshit, it switches off, just shuts your cognition down and you blank out.
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Paul Beatty |
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ec7cbc7
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Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy,
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Paul Beatty |
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1ed27a4
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Perspicacity.
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Paul Beatty |
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faddb8e
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instead of simply saying, "A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar," he'd say, "The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It's a plane. I"
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Paul Beatty |
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4201dfb
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I fuck like an upturned guppy.
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Paul Beatty |
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79538bd
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I fuck like an overturned guppy.
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Paul Beatty |
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5f16554
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But in the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of 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 domina..
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Paul Beatty |
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60a6844
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Our teacher says we're supposed to be colorblind. That's hard to do if you can see color, isn't it?" "Yeah, I'd say so, but I think your teacher means don't make any assumptions based on color." "Cross on the green and not in between."
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racism
race-relations
race
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Paul Beatty |
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f85e10e
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You either a poet or a homosexual." "Oh, shit, that's fucked up. Why can't I be both?"
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poets
poetry
homosexuals
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Paul Beatty |
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bf83c84
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When I reached the vestibule of my apartment building, the campus police closed in on me. I heard Professor Edelstein shout, it's okay, he's a poet. Matter of fact, the best black ... the best poet writing today." The cops instantly backed off. I was protected by poetic immunity. I had permission to act crazy."
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poets
poetry
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Paul Beatty |
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ce70b61
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At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, "White people were hearing something in jaz..
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Paul Beatty |
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dce8acb
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Any nigger who isn't paranoid is crazy ... Ullus niger vir quisnam est non insanus ist rabidus is
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Paul Beatty |
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9f85cb6
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LGBTDL Crisis Center for Chicanos, Blacks, Non-Gays, and Anyone Else Who Feels Underserved, Unsupported, and Exploited by Hit Cable Television Shows,
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Paul Beatty |
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01609d8
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Sto facendo studi a dimostrazione che il vino rosso e davvero la panacea per tutti i mali
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Paul Beatty |
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71865e0
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Quando la mente subisce un picco energetico di stress e stronzate, si spegne, chiude i circuiti cognitivi, e tu hai un vuoto mentale. Agisci, ma non sei consapevole delle tue azioni
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Paul Beatty |
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782de21
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Maybe morons can't become brain surgeons, but a genius can be either a cardiologist or a postal clerk. Or a bus driver. A bus driver who made some fucked-up choices.
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Paul Beatty |
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e15d672
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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, skateboards, and Rollerblades are for health nuts and kids, people with nowhere to go. And all cars, from the luxury import to the classified-ad jalopy, are status symbols, because no matter how shoddy the upholstery, how bouncy the ride, how fucke..
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Paul Beatty |
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6237436
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In polite democratic society its important to note stratification but impolite to label the layers.
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Paul Beatty |
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0384d47
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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 you're doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn't have been less psychologically damaging if they'd thought of it as "gardening," I got a vicious beating that would've made Kunta Kinte wince."
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Paul Beatty |