Hollywood Shuffle - Black Acting 101

As a black kid of the 80's who rode a skateboard and fully enunciated his curse words, I'm a grizzled old veteran when it comes to having my "blackness" continuously questioned - a ritual that began at Kempsville Jr. High School to be exact. Kids who couldn't tell you a black history fact if you held an oozy to their collective temples felt I was a race traitor because I had a penchant for kick-flip ollies and backside wall rides - my colloquialisms gave the few black kids in my school the belief that I'd be the snitch if there ever was a race war. Despite my fondness of being born with melanin, the tons of black history books that I digested with ease like they were comic books, my life-long dedication to Hip Hop, the teachers that I continuously challenged whenever they came out of their mouths sideways concerning race - not to mention all the black girls who had "first dibs" on my heart(all 7 of them). But at the end of the day, I was "trying to be white" because I rode a skateboard and pronounced the "er" at the end of the word "motherfucker".

Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last 20 years. From that white dude I met this past weekend who thought that taking on a black persona involved crotch grabbing and murdering the English language as frequent as humanly possible, the Clear-Channel minstrel show that many rap artists perform nowadays, and the mass amounts of black chicks who won't come within a square mile of my penis because I loathe Tyler Perry - if that's what it means to be "black", I think I'll pass. Remember back when shows like "In Living Color" would joke about how "white" Bryant Gumbel was simply because of how he spoke? But on B.E.T they've been setting the race back with it's deplorable broadcasts for more than a decade now. Not for nothing, but I feel that Paul Mooney should revise his Chappelle Show statement. "Reginald Hudlin and Robert Johnson make Bryant Gumbel look like Marcus Garvey!!"