…if you’re talking about hipsters, and want to get somewhere, you might be better off just talking hip hop. To more directly get to the point. To make your words and ideas more actionable. To skip indulging in intellectual exercises like “The White Negro.” To choose the more difficult route: learning hip hop codes and sensibility, because it’s a genuine culture, not a shell or an aesthetic. It’s not a rationalization, it has depth. If both hipsterism and hip-hop are doors to move all of us on to a shared place, hip hop is the one that isn’t revolving, returning you to where you started.

I’ve been around for the better part of three decades, and not ONCE has a white person provided me with some sort of salvation. I feel shortchanged. There was no teacher who saw something in me, no employer who defended my rights and no white family who kindly took me into their home. To be fair, I have never performed any seemingly magical act of humanity for the benefit of any white folks. I never showed up on anyone’s doorstep barely able to form a sentence, yet somehow capable of transforming lives, saving marriages and instilling hope in the hearts of good meaning pale people.

Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.