Over the River and Through the 'Hood

My friend Daniel Chavis is lead singer in a band called The Veldt and my go-to and guy-on-the-ground when it comes to the ongoing and insidious shafting of black people in America. American blacks are a unique group, a caste and class invented by white people and burdened with all the incidental evil of white consumer culture and forced into service to act as a repository for everything earthy and rooted in reality and whatever else makes white America feel unexceptional, banal and uneasy.

The sick American myth of exceptionalism and worldly and otherworldly superiority is still pervasive and increasingly absurd as we demonstrate to the rest of humanity how stupid and fucked-up we are, partly by our defensiveness. Anyway, Merry Christmas, Daniel. Thank you for helping to keep me in touch with this unfortunate situation. Daniel is taking care of his grandmother this Christmas. She's old as shit but still feisty and characteristically enduring, as black people must be in a white man's America.