Watching the news about Diallo, my eight year-old cousin, Jake,

asks why don’t they build black people

with bulletproof skin? I tell Jake there’s another planet, where

humans change colors like mood rings.

You wake up Scottish, and fall asleep Chinese; enter a theatre

Persian, and exit Puerto Rican. And Earth

is a junkyard planet, where they send all the broken humans

who are stuck in one color. That pseudo-

angels in the world before this offer deals to black fetuses, to give up

their seats on the shuttle to earth, say: wait

for the next one, conditions will improve. Then Jake asks do they

have ghettos in the afterlife? Seven years ago

I sat in a car, an antenna filled with crack cocaine smoldering

between my lips, the smoke spreading

in my lungs, like the legs of Joseph Stalin’s mom in the delivery

room. An undercover piglet hoofed up

to the window. My buddy busted an illegal u-turn, screeched

the wrong way down a one-way street.

I chucked the antenna, shoved the crack rock up my asshole.

The cops swooped in from all sides,

yanked me out. I clutched my ass cheeks like a third fist gripping

a winning lotto ticket. The cop yelled,

White boys only come in this neighborhood for two reasons: to steal

cars and buy drugs. You already got wheels.

I ran into the burning building of my mind. I couldn’t see shit.

It was filled with crack smoke. I dug

through the ashes of my conscience, till I found my educated, white

male dialect, which I stuck in my voice box

and pushed play. Officer, I’m going to be honest with you: Blah,

blah, blah. See, the sad truth is my skin

said everything he needed to know. My skin whispered into his pink

ear, I’m white. You can’t pin shit on this

pale fabric. This pasty cloth is pin resistant. Now slap my wrist,

so I can go home, take this rock out

of my ass, and smoke it. If Diallo was white, the bullets would’ve

bounced off his chest like spitballs. But

his execution does prove that a black man with a wallet is as dangerous

to the cops as a black man with an Uzi.

Maybe he whipped that wallet out like a grenade, hollered, I buy,

therefore I am an American. Or maybe

he just said, hey man, my tax money paid for two of the bullets

in that gun. Last year on vacation in DC,

little Jake wondered how come there’s a Vietnam wall, Abe Lincoln’s

house, a Holocaust building, but nothing

about slavery?  No thousand-foot sculpture of a whip. No

giant dollar bill dipped in blood.

Is it ‘cause there’s no Hitler to blame it on, no donkey to stick it on?

Are they afraid the blacks will want a settlement?

I mean, if Japanese-Americans locked up in internment camps

for five years cashed out at thirty g’s, what’s

the price tag on a three-hundred-year session with a dominatrix

who’s not pretending? And the white people

say we gave ‘em February. Black History Month. But it’s so much

easier to have a month than an actual

conversation. Jake, life is one big song, and we are the chorus.

Riding the subway is a chorus. Driving

the freeway is a chorus. But you gotta stay ready, ‘cause you never

know when the other instruments will

drop out, and ta-dah—it’s your moment in the lit spot, the barometer

of your humanity, and you’ll hear the footsteps

of a hush, rushing through the theater, as you aim for the high notes

with the bow and arrow in your throat.

(via thepianofarm)