Niggas be literate.
Niggas have ideas.
Niggas think about more than ops & spinning the block with the stick with the switch & the dick.
Niggas do more than throw off pH balances in expertly rendered backshots.
Niggas can spell existentialism.
Niggas can properly use erudite. Cantankerous.
Niggas can make anything a gerund.
Niggas revel in sunscreen discourse diasporas.
Niggas can smell coded language when it’s just an electrical signal.
Niggas stay full off of offhanded comments & the well-intentioned.
Niggas will push your buttons to the point of explosions just to check something out.
Niggas have blood & eidetic memory.
Niggas are petty. In the fun way. At least for niggas.
Niggas like watching you squirm.
Niggas wish a nigga would.
Niggas are simultaneously, perpetually, the right & wrong one.
Niggas can swim but saying they can’t is the only thing they can do unquestioned & the
dopamine hit of not being immediately on the defensive & justifying existence is like a
long pull off of a Kool or blunt rolled with a wood tip Black & Mild.
Niggas can bury you in choose-your-own-adventure intellectual word salad while wearing wave
caps, durags, or silk bonnets, in naturals or silk pressed, in synthetic or virgin Yaki, in
Bigen or baldies.
Niggas love seeing themselves worn in public as a costume, a shortcut to cultural coolness that’s
as easy to slip out of as muddy shoes at a door.
Niggas love being told what they really mean when they say shit that has to be looked up &
cross-referenced like a classical language, especially when it’s the words they’ve been
using the same way for all of their lives. And their parents’ lives. And their parents’
parents’ lives. & however far back niggas can track a purposefully incomplete history.
Niggas can be pro-Black and still not fuck with some niggas.
Niggas love when you reference Thomas Sowell, because niggas know why you’re referencing
Thomas Sowell.
Niggas know the short list of replacements if it’s not Thomas Sowell.
Niggas know this is doubly true for the converse.
Niggas love a good MLK anecdote. You know, that one. The same one. Every time.
Niggas doubly love this with James Baldwin. Niggas’ll see the same interview clips &
highlighted text & nod their heads, then raise an eyebrow, then roll their eyes, to think
that you know them by bookmarks alone.
Niggas can say THEY KILLED THIS DUDE NAME JESUS…WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’LL
DO TO YOU???! & you’ll find a way to have the most bad faith reading of it because
heaven forbid niggas can feel any emotion, let alone pain, hurt, or betrayal from someone
they considered their day one, because for some reason niggas should be constantly
Jabari barking.
Niggas are running out of ways to explain their reality without resorting to sock puppets.
Niggas don’t have the time to center their lives on you as they’re already living theirs in
uninterrupted surreal tableaus.
Niggas is tired.