The hour badly spent

Long ago, my mother told me the origin of the word "jazz." Early in the 20th century, white people slandered the art form by calling it "ass" music. When it started actually catching on, everyone had to call it something else, less ass-ish. Add J, change the SS to ZZ. And quit being so square.

As part of my journal project for Development of the English Language, I checked up on my mom’s story and looked up the etymology of jazz in the OED. Turns out my she was mostly right. In West Africa, "jas" or "jass" was a word that meant "hurry up," having a strong sexual connotation. When black people in America started to play the type of music we now call jazz, mainstream musical culture wanted to deride the style by calling it "jass," with emphasis on the sexual connotation. But it caught on. So instead they did the thing with the ZZs.

I dutifully reported my findings to Dr. Potts (legs!) one afternoon after she had showed the class an educational film on jive talk. The next class period, she talked about the word jazz. Exactly what I had told her!

To emphasize her point, she wrote "jazz" on the board.

Then next to it she wrote "jass."

But she put a space between j and ass.

Then she underlined ass.

Then she said something else.

Then she said "ass."

Okay, yes, I know that was a lot of buildup for a minor payoff. But I am, like, really immature. Scope it: later on that day Dr. Potts solicited our input on the origin of the word cockroach.

"Where do you get that word? Does it have anything to do with roach? Or cock?"

Over Xmas break I worked for this lady — a professional screenwriter — doing odd errands for her and getting no pay in return, a relationship known as an "internship." I thought it might be nice to get the experience of being around an experienced writer blah blah blah, but the more she talked — and she loved to namedrop — the more I realized she was a self-centered drama queen. This weekend I got a Facebook message from her. Things like this make me avoid Facebook.

1. I took A DAY (OMG!) to respond because (A) I had shit to do, and (B) I didn’t feel like resolving a 40-ish-year-old woman’s ‘crisis.’ Since she’s messaging me on Facebook, she must have seen my status update: "I just don’t give a shit." I really don’t.
2. "Negro?" I know we’re both black and therefore we have that unspoken camaraderie that enables us a certain familiarity. Nonetheless, not even my own mother talks to me that way, and you don’t know me like that.

 

The reason I addressed her like that is because when a boss is acting like a childish wanker (did I use it right that time?), said boss should have his or her twittery vomited back with a clear explanation as to why it’s coming. As a bonus, I like to throw in a middle finger.

And I wasn’t kidding about the apartment thing. She called me one Sunday afternoon, from Los Angeles, while I’m in Manhattan Kansas — which she knew — and told me she wanted me to find her an apartment by Monday morning. The reason? She had a psycho roommate (her 2nd or 3rd this year — I don’t bother keeping track) and COULDN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE and somehow this was suddenly my problem too.

Part of being a grown-up is learning how to negotiate with the people around you, instead of throwing a shitfit when someone takes a sip of your orange juice or smokes your weed. Right?

See? We’re getting her GOOD SIDE here. Don’t you feel lucky? In her defense, she really did endure a severe personal tragedy last year. Which had absolutely nothing to do with me.

 

It’s tangential, but this conversation reminds me of an episode of Blind Date I saw years ago. A guy from New York was on with a girl from a small Texas town. The texan was superhot, not a ditz, and she seemed to be putting some effort into the outing. The New York asshat wasn’t having any of it. The whole time, he was all "It’s just that you’re from this small town, where everyone’s so narrow-minded. I’m from New York, where there’s so much going on, so many people from so many different cultures, and it’s really broadened my horizons. Blah blah blah blah, New York is soooo great but your podunk town sucks, ipso facto, you suck and always will." The irony was not lost on the Texan, who kept going "Well, what do you mean? How can I make this date better?"

Of course he couldn’t say what he meant, so I will. "Broadening horizons" doesn’t actually give you a deeper understanding of other people; it just makes you more condescending toward them. In New York, you don’t mix with other cultures. You mix with New York culture. So here’s the question: what is it, exactly, about the Big Apple, that brings out the douchiest in people? That is, of course, rhetorical; I don’t give a shit.

Months ago, when Brett King first ran an article about Indiana requiring voters to produce valid ID at the polls, the issue seemed a bit strange, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. Requiring IDs to vote seemed like a benign enough idea, but why, exactly, was it necessary?

I can’t imagine Indiana has a huge turnout of illegal aliens sneaking by pollsters in droves, causing severe upsets in the makeup of school district boards or whatever. And most of the time, when I hear about election fraud, it’s less likely to be "Mr. Worthington paid 8,000 fake constituents to show up and vote" — which is properly called voter fraud — and more probably along the lines of "Mr. Worthington bribed a single official to toss out 8,000 ballots" — which is more properly called election fraud.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Justice John Paul Stevens said that Indiana’s desire to prevent fraud and to inspire voter confidence in the election system are important even though there have been no reports of the kind of fraud the law — backed overwhelmingly by Republicans — was designed to combat.

So I was kind of puzzled as to why we would focus the crackdown on the electorate, when the angle of entrenched-power cronyism seems more likely and more pernicious. Then I ran across some new information:

The Indiana law was challenged in separate suits filed by the Indiana Democratic Party and by another group of plaintiffs that included elected officials and community groups.The plaintiffs argued that the state had failed to justify a requirement they said would place a special burden on thousands of eligible voters in Indiana who lack driver’s licenses, a group that disproportionately includes the poor, the elderly and people with disabilities.

Writing for the 2-to-1 majority at the appeals court, Judge Richard A. Posner agreed with the plaintiffs that the law would have the greatest impact on people who were “low on the economic ladder and thus, if they do vote, are more likely to vote for Democratic than Republican candidates.”

I guess it always comes back to red vs. blue. Therefore, Brett’s column this week welcomes us to the New World Order; in which the poor and the undesirables don’t have a say, just like in the Old World Older. As long as we’re getting all regressey, why not just do it exactly the way we used to, where you had to be a property-owning white male in order to vote?

The problem with his argument, though, is the fact that Indiana provides free IDs to citizens who do not have a driver’s license.

Fair enough. I guess this is just like that time conservatives insisted that the government which governs best, governs least, except apparently under certain arbitrary conditions.

After the Democratic Party’s claims of voter fraud in many elections - including the 2000 presidential election - any individual with at least a small amount of common sense would think helping to curve voter fraud would be a good course of action.

Having eligible citizens voting in elections is essential to the progress of our republic, but to encourage participation, voters must feel their vote matters and won’t be canceled out by those attempting to commit voter fraud.

Yeah, a little perspective on that whole Y2K Florida debacle: the problem was NOT that non-citizens were voting. It’s that electoral authorities and the police were removing people from the poll lines and stopping them from voting, and that this took place only in overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhoods. It was pretty clearly NOT voter fraud and SO election fraud. And it wasn’t just the Democratic party making those claims: local newspapers told the stories of a pretty fair number of individuals who were there to witness democracy inaction. I can’t help but wonder if Brett King’s equivocation was accidental right-wing cluelessness or purposeful right-wing malice.

 

Don’t you ever wish people would stop making such a big fucking deal over the word ‘nigger?’ Two of K-State’s "best and brightest" journalism students (take that, Whitney Hodgin!) interviewed Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder in front of a crowd of captive hearts in Forum Hall. So Deborah Muhwezi asked him what was up with his characters’ frequent use of the n-word.

"I’d rather people say ‘nigga’ than say ‘n-word’ because n-word is stupid. It’s fundamentally immature, like saying ‘dookie’ among first-graders; like we are running from a truth we all know is there."

"I certainly understand the sensitivity and power behind it," he continued. But it’s vapid and pointless to huff and puff all your outrage on that. "There are lots of people whose job it is to keep the conversation of race at the level of ‘we shouldn’t use the n-word on TV’," he said, which keeps us from finding any real resolutions to real social problems.

Yeah, so politics is kind of a downer, and McGruder is in the funny business. How does he make it work?

"If you set out to tear down stereotypes, well then that’s positive, and we definitely try not to be that. We have to find a way to make it funny."

In his comedy, McGruder spins a version of what black people seem to talk like behind closed doors when they’re really fucking drunk (like me) and high (not like me, but I’m working on that). The nature of comedy and storytelling is such that positive portrayals are inherently boring; showing us the parts of ourselves that are dirty and embarrassing gives his work a special kind of truthful bite. Servicey!

"We don’t find the stuff very controversial. In other words, we’re not very sensitive people."

Also, without a line between entertainment and news, those two mated and gave birth to a voracious infantile media machine that’s set up to gobble up ratings out of whatever shlock it can find but then use our collective brains as its diaper. So fuck Fox News. And CNN and MSNBC and the whole pundit industry in all its incarnations. But mostly Fox. And BET too. And if Whitney Hodgins’ article ever goes live on the Collegian web site I’ll make sure to link you, ya know, whenever I get around to it. In the meantime I’m doing homework and NOT prowling for Boondocks episodes on teh YooToobz. Probably.

 

The International Festival of Talents took place Sunday at McCain Auditorium. The performances were apparently a hit. Whitney Hodgin provided a servicey recap in today’s Collegian.

Singer Minako Nemoto and pianist Jun Tadaki, junior in business administration, conveyed "the beauty of spring" in Japan with such precision that it was easy to forget that most of the audience didn’t understand the language Nemoto was singing in.

"My initial reaction is ‘wow’," said Vikas Bahirwani, graduate student in computer science. "These performances are doing away with the language barrier."

    Doing away with the language barrier? All right Whitney, I get it. Whitney’s cultural enrichment this weekend obviously exceeded mine by far. She attended the International Festival of Talents. I attended TengaiCon, a local supernerd gaming convention.

    Whitney heard a Japanese man sing The Marriage of Figaro, bringing Mozart’s score to life. I watched a bunch of kids from Wichita dress up like bit parts in Princess Mononoke.
    Whitney saw Philipinos light up the stage "while balancing candles on their heads." I saw a fat middle-aged guy light up a D&D game board with a lucky roll of the dice.
    Whitney saw an Indian student perform a "personal" dance piece that "combined modern music with several decades of dance moves, including the moonwalk." I stumbled and flailed in front of Dance Dance Revolution for two hours, quitting after I got schooled by some skinny nerd.
    When Whitney walked away from the event, she probably still had "the beauty of spring" resounding in her dulcet ears. When I walked away from the dance pad, I heard the kid go "What does ‘high score’ mean? Did I break it?" Then he dropped a smoke bomb, and although he was no longer there when the smoke cleared, everyone could still hear his villainous laughter.

"The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness of the powder keg ready to blow in Europe." And so begins this week’s issue of Neocon Weekly in the Collegian’s Op Ed page.

Brett King’s article focuses on the release of Fitna, a 15-minute documentary made by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, that reportedly shows video segments of militant Muslims declaring war on Western civilization, in addition to Quran quotes encouraging violence.

(As if those particular soundbites are the entire Quran. Like they’re even put into context in their respective passages).

In 1984 (what, don’t you fucking read?), Orwell writes about a daily ritual called the two-minutes’ hate, in which the ruling political party gathers all of its members together in front of a bigscreen TV and makes them watch a video depicting an Enemy of the People maligning the nation. Whipped into senseless fury, the party members shout and throw shit at the screen, expressing their surging rage against whoever the authorities tell them to.

 

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

Sounds like their team is winning! So why, exactly, are they so pissed? Their authoritarian government has made almost every aspect of human nature illegal (especially fucking); the people come to the two-minutes’ hate so they can expel the violence and humanity simmering beneath their consciousness. That way no aggression will remain to direct against authoritarianism, the true enemy of humanity.

 

"The only hate speech which seems to be spread is coming from the radical Muslims themselves," wrote King, failing to grasp in the slightest how this film is patently offensive. That, presumably, is always the problem: willful ignorance.

The film is a one-sided portrayal of the Muslim world; a view that panders to racism and fear. Flyover-state neocons will see this and take this video to be the truth about all of Islam. They will write op-ed columns in newspapers across America that will marginalize all Muslims based on this small, vocal segment. I know how it works all too well; in L.A. we’ve all watched "Bowling for Columbine" ten thousand times. We think all Midwesterners are exactly like Tim McVeigh. Also: I learned all about women from 2 girls, 1 cup.

"Racial divides in Europe have increased substantially over the past decades as Muslims have immigrated to many European countries," writes Brett. "Refusing to integrate to European society and committing themselves to continue the practice of Sharia law within the borders of their host country has produced a difficult situation for many." Solution: strike down freedom of religion. Replace it with a border fence!

"Film should not be condemned but studied," reads the column’s headline, somewhat awkwardly. Yes, the video should be studied; but not in isolation, like a formula that purports to tell us exactly how all Muslims supposedly tick. Rather, it should — wait for it — be put into context with the rest of Islamic society.

An enormous portion of Muslim society has been quick to try to distance itself from the rhetoric on Arab TV stations. Yesterday, Radwan Abu Ayyash, deputy minister of culture in Ramallah, was quoted in the New York Times on this exact issue:

What is not fine is to build up children with a culture of hatred, of closed minds, a culture of sickness. I don’t think they always know what they are creating. People use one weapon, language, without realizing that they also use it against themselves.

Seriously man, front-page story. Don’t you fucking read? Of course you don’t. "The week passed for most citizens of the United States with little awareness…"

Criminologist discusses gender, urban inequality among African Americans

If Adrianne doesn’t want me to criticize her, why does everything about her March 14 story, from the headline to the ending quote, sound like it was written by a first-year PR robot?

I’m pretty sure she has, tucked away in her repertoire, a passive-aggressive gesture of disapproval for writers who (1) lead with a quote, and (2) lead with an inflated, verbose block of text. So how does she justify this: "Youths’ descriptions fit quite closely to scholars’ examinations of how structural inequalities negatively impact the ability to generate social ties and protective networks necessary to combat crime."

I’d probably paraphrase thusly: "Experts claim that a in white-male centered society, crime is the only path to social mobility for poor urban ethnic kids, and - surprise! - poor urban kids agree." And confirm it with the expert, of course, who in this case was "Jody Miller, associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri - St. Louis."

At the end of the article, a source says "It was really interesting to hear a qualitative interview process and getting to see the actual quotes of what people saw in their communities and neighborhoods."

See that? His reaction to the presentation was "It was really interesting," perhaps as opposed to "It was really boring" or, more specifically, "I sat in the ninth row and felt up my girlfriend." People spew "it was interesting…" quotes when they don’t actually have an opinion or any information. At least he provided a handy, concise summary of the event. Maybe that’s how the lede should sound?

I was invited to the Sexy Communist Spy’s roommate’s birthday bash (in Russia, Party throw YOU!). This one had a theme: "thug party," which meant there were a bunch of dry-humping, ass-smacking, half-drunk, red-state 22-year-olds dressed like Missy Elliot. True to form, I showed up late wearing my Super Mario Strikers jersey (I fucking represent!), a pick in my hair, and I threw up lots of gang signs (I don’t actually know any gang signs). K-fed came by too.

An hour after I got there, the party died down. Umm, it wasn’t my fault. This time. Birthday girl was still juiced and wanted to hit the bars, so we did just that (in Russia, bars hit YOU!). I danced and barhopped and met a super-superhot townie and got to mackin’ to this bitch named Sadie (Sadie!) and generally made merry while Birthday Girl zigzagged from table to table, friend to friend, stranger to stranger, nizzle to nizzle, so proud to have people watch her turn 22, but she was also - I dunno - pretty stressed out?

It was obvs she missed her boyfriend pretty badly and no one in these bars could have possibly made up for that. I wanted to tell her to stop, be cool, roll down the street smoking endo sipping on gin and juice, laid back; just chillax and enjoy yourself. It’s YOUR birthday! Tha homies are supposed to come to YOU! But she never really got the chance, because not five minutes after I inhaled the sandwich she got me on her maxed-out Visa, as she dashed off to say hi to a familiar face 10 yards away, she tripped, fell, and busted her lip. While she sat there, crying, bleeding, and ashamed, I promptly revoked her pimp card.

According to Brett King’s latest right-wing ejaculation, gun control was a measure Nazi Germany took to ensure ethnic minorities were powerless when the government wanted to haul a bunch of them off to death camps. Gun control in America will be like Nazism in America. Get it? GUN CONTROL = NAZISM.

Brett, if you vote Democrat and elect a leader who’s black or a woman, you won’t have to worry about it.

Nevertheless, the central issue remains: will violence be stamped out if we let students with conceal-and-carry permits take guns around school and into classes? You bet it will! It’s like with the atom bomb; when only one nation had it, those white people basically blasted whatever Asians they wanted to; now that a whole bunch of people have nukes, the world is a much safer place! Still not convinced? Consider this chart:

As you can clearly see, the more guns in circulation, the fewer deaths. Until everyone gets them and we all kill each other. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. The important thing is to take the first step and arm as many people as we can.

Enough quibbling over figures. Why stop with just letting students pack heat? I say we split the campus up, let the elites carrying concealed each be responsible for a different "territory," and the rest of us can just pay protection money!

Also: thanks for sharing that "Hearty Stew" recipe. But I’m kind of a city boy, so instead of venison, I use the flesh of urban schoolchildren. The only drawback is that it tends to be high in crack. On the plus side, it’s high in crack.

Yesterday a superhot Colombian grad student presented a "deconstruction" of Afro-Columbian art in the Big 12 room. She showed off some older Colombian paintings and sculpture as well as some of her own mixed-media work, which was pretty rad. Sadly, she kind of zoomed through each piece, in soft-spoken Spanish, without giving us much time to reflect on the details of the works she showed us.

Her translator - who was really cute - cute is the new hot - also kept throwing us off with gaffes like this one: "There were very few soldiers within the independence movement who were black. Oh, I’m sorry; there were MANY black soldiers within the movement who were black. They just weren’t recognized."

Apparently, still not.

Just scanning today’s front page. Hmm… “KSU Horse Judging team wins world championship.” Fascinating! Not a sport that I particularly follow, but it is kinda kewl, because chicks look hot with those boots and that riding crop. And they rode those fillies all over the world, no doubt! WOW!

Looks like Ryne chose to lead by making grammatical errors, using too many words (“When COMMA most people think of successful K-State team, one of the basketball teams or the volleyball team might come to mind.”), and apparently talking about some other sports, presumably because those sports are exciting. But horses are fun too. Wait a sec… did you say horse JUDGING team? So they don’t actually ride; they gawk at the athletes, rank them, and then get ranked on that? 750 words, you say? It takes NINE people to do this, you say? And you can get a trophy for this?

Well, I guess this was educational, but I totally just lost the interest I barely had. At least the photos are nice.

The article about Ice T’s speech probably should have been front and center instead of the aforementioned horse shit. It was actually a good article! Eric hit the nail on the head: “Despite the lack of discussion of serious modern day civil rights movements, the crowd was receptive of the message blah blah blah.” Kudos sir!

Glaring omissions in Adrianne DeWeese’s “$1.8 million grant funds pathogen research:” what the fuck does Ehrlichia chaffeensis actually do? All that "vector" info is really really helpful - who knew ticks and mosquitos actually - wait for it - carry germs? - but once infected, what are the symptoms? Adrianne doesn’t seem to want to tell us anywhere in the article, except that it “kills about 3 percent of those infected.” I can only assume that it’s instant, and it looks sort of like getting Vader’s force-choke.

Ice T came to the Little Apple last night to regale us with a speech in honor of MLK’s birthday.

 

After Mr. T’s speech everyone seemed to think it was "predictable" and I could see that, b/c all the jazz about how real his background is - troubled formative years, turning to rap help to escape the self-destructiveness of modern urban life, etc etc etc etc (basically exactly like my life! except sexier and without all the middle-class nerd bullshit) - has completely been done to death in every speech ever given by anybody over the last 30 years. But what struck a chord with me is that he went to high school across the street from where I went to middle school and sorta near where I live:

 

Whatevs. Anyway, later on he actually called on me to ask a question! I effed it up by trying to get him him to say something aggressive to all the shitkicking fucktard minority-haters I’ve met while in Kansas and he more or less blew it off, which is understandable because it was a pretty dumb one. I don’t know WHY, exactly, but since I’ve come here I constantly feel like I have to hear the small-town idiocy here repudiated over and over again. So I asked a pretty dumb question and it totally embarrassed the people who brought me here (ed. note: sorry about that. I was really drunk) and made them politely whisper "sit the F down," but I’m sorta stuck here for a while and can’t just jaunt off to New York City and have the issue disappear quietly into the night. Meh.

 

As an aside: up until a few days ago, I was pretty sure I would vote for John Edwards in the Democratic primary, but I suddenly had an epiphany. It was a glimmering, gleaming vision of a new kind of America. I envisioned all the white supremacists of this republic, all the drooling wahoos of the midwest, all the klansmen of north Florida, all the repressed homo cowboys of the Great State of Texas, all the mindless wingnuts of Kansas - I’m talking to you, Collegian - I pictured them all coming together in unity and suffering a seething, searing pain like a red-hot poker up the bunghole EVERY MOMENT that Obama is in office, and now I pray to God that this comes to pass.

And now it’s time for breakfast. They don’t serve nicotine at Kramer, so I guess I’m on my own here.

So, the other day, I was talking with the scriptwriter I had been interning for. About girls I’ve dated. She mentioned, quite politely, her disapproval of miscegenation. That, in a general sense, because of the racial divide, a white girl won’t ever "truly understand where I’m coming from."And she’s right: from a racial perspective, a white girl will never understand me.

Then again, maybe no one ever will.

I’m in a unique position. I’m obviously black and white people know it. Black people, however, love to kvetch that I’m too white. Whatever that means. They LOVE it. Many of my brothers and sisters treat blackness like some sort of club, at which they’re the bouncers.

There are so many ways to understand me. Race is just one element. Frankly, it’s not even on my mind as much as the Community Authorities tell me it should be. Those Elders are, frankly, real downers. The Authorities love nothing better than to maintain cultural purity, to look down their noses at non-compliance; to sell their own brand of racial kitsch. I’m just not buying it. I don’t shop there.

That’s what they’re doing. They’re selling a brand of blackness. Where I lived and went to grade school, as black women grew up, they develop a certan unapologetic materialism; an ethic of the conspicuous consumer, an identity based on brands of clothes, types of cars, and material status symbols. It was really not attractive at all. To be fair, this trait is present in women of all races, but in the black women I’ve met, it always feels excessive. And hollow. And to be fair, yes, there are white women who buy into this gaudy consumerism. Guess what? I don’t date those chicks either.

I should avoid white women and make more of an effort to seek out like-minded black women, They say.

It’s not fair to expect that of me. Meeting someone I like who likes me back is hard enough as it is. It’s not like I’ve got throngs of chicks beatinga path to my door. I’m lonely enough as it is. Why make it harder for myself? Human nature opposes it. And therein lies the crux of this issue: my Nature is not what the Community Elders say it is. They are not the Deciders. I am. I decide what it means for me to be black. Not them. Not you. Me.

I don’t mind explaining this to someone who’s willing to listen. Not surprisingly, those who buy into the racial kitsch are the least willing to hear me out. Those with open ears and open minds are the ones I gravitate towards. Simple as that.

I thought I had put this discussion to bed years ago. One summer I was interning at the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black weekly alternative paper. At the time I was in a horrific and extremely painful long-distance relationship with a white girl I met in Syracuse (I didn’t discuss the painful part much, though). Anyway, the subject came up, of course, between me, my editor, and the other interns. What’s your girlfriend like? Why are you dating white girls? Why not find a sista?

And then, my editor, Marsha - an incredibly wise and perceptive woman, pointed something out about herself and all the other ladies in the room.

"If I think about the kind of girl I was at that age," she said, "I wouldn’t have gone out with Jelani. I think most of you are the same way."

And there it was. Simple. Insightful. True. Even the ones who think they need to fix me up wouldn’t give me the time of day. Not that I blame them; I was, and remain, ever a big dork through and through. I completely dig it if that’s not your type. But then, you can’t fault me for going after my type either.

The best and awesomest relationship I ever had was with a bisexual Jewish redhead. I explained the racial stuff to her. She explained the femiladyism stuff to me. She was really good at that shit. Sometimes we’d even fight about it. We also got dirty looks everywhere we went. The cashiers at Target, unfriendly black hotties, gave her dirty looks when I turned my back. The old Jewish ladies in our condo gave me dirty looks when I turned my back. And we got bad service at every single restaurant we went to. Also, predictably, the folks at my job - an alternative black weekly rag - Disapproved and made no secret of it.

What kind of nonsense is that? Knowing absolutely nothing about me or her, they expected to drive some sort of wedge between us, with their 1930s segregationist dogma. Guess what? It didn’t work. The 1930s ended (I forget exactly when). That bullshit doesn’t drive people apart; it brings them together. Dirty looks and bad service became a shared experience that strenghtened our bond. We’d feel it happening and squeeze each other’s hand a little tighter and pull each other a little closer, and when we got home, we had sex. Sometimes we’d pretend it was exciting and taboo. Afterward we would crack campy, vaguely racist jokes. Her sense of humor turned me on and so after that we’d do it again. That’s how I roll.

How’d we hook up in the first place? I liked her sense of humor and she liked mine. You haven’t known true despair til you’ve been with someone who does not Get The Joke. She and I got each other, intuitively, even if the race thing was not second nature. That one thing, along with the spicey stuff we’d do in bed, was always waaaaaaay more important than our differences.

Confidential to you who still say I’m not black enough: there’s nothing wrong with the way I am. If you think there is then to hell with you.