Read Online Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach - Free Book Online

six of L.A.’s Finest, so murky that they might be figments of imagination, swinging billy clubs with pickax motions as if the huddled mass of Rodney King might be a craggy slab of granite or an arid patch of land.
    “Nice picture.”
    Nique turned and scowled. “Nice? Either you got a real limited vocabulary or a serious problem. Ain’t nothing nice about the shit.”
    Macon shook his head. “No, I mean, of course not. I— What I meant was . . .” He gave up on speaking and pushed the left sleeve of his T-shirt to his shoulder. Tattooed on Macon’s biceps in small green characters was
4-29-92.
It was the day the verdict had been handed down, the day Los Angeles had burned. Andre and Dominique peered in to read it, then looked up at Macon.
    “A Jewish kid with numbers tattooed on his arm,” said Andre blankly, taking the beer Nique passed him. “Now I’ve seen it all.”
    Macon lifted one mouth corner in a half-smile that looked more like a twitch. “That’s exactly what my mom said.” The numbers glistened slightly on his skin, bathed in the soft light of Nique’s halogen. “She started going off about the Holocaust. I was like, ‘Please. Nobody in this family has been inside a temple in three generations. How am I supposed to be Jewish enough to know better?’ ” Macon broke off, accepted a bottle from Nique, and plugged his mouth with it, swigging until he trusted himself not to speak.
    I’m not Jewish, Andre thought, and I know better.
    Nique looked from Andre to Macon and then back to Andre. He ran a hand over his smooth-shaved head. “Who is this dude, Dre?” he asked with cinematic incredulity and perfect comic timing, the results of an upbringing replete with four movie channels and unlimited TV privileges. “Mufucker got a Rodney King tattoo? Shit, I thought I was black.”
    Macon walked over to the photo-still and stared at it. The night in question firecrackered through his mind. Without turning from the wall, he spoke. “It was an important day.”
    “For niggas in L.A., no doubt,” said Nique. “But you gonna have to enlighten me as to why it was so crucial for a whiteboy from . . .”
    “Massachusetts,” Macon said.
    “Right.”
    Macon shrugged. “Things changed.”
    “Ain’t shit change, man.”
    “Things changed for me.”
    Nique looked at Andre. “Is he always like this?”
    “I’ve known him for two hours, Nique.” A good old-fashioned race man, Andre thought suddenly. He smiled at the notion of his roommate decked out in Black Panther garb, and decided that living with this cat might prove to be the most exhausting task he’d ever undertaken.
    “Fine,” said Nique. “We’ll play twenty questions. How did shit change for you?”
    “I stopped believing in justice even a little bit. Any faith I had left in the system, or in white people, pretty much evaporated when I noticed that no one around me gave a fuck.”
    Nique rested his chin on his thumb, drummed long fingers against his temple, and nodded. “Interesting.” Macon hoped it was enough. He didn’t intend to tell the story, no matter how hard Nique pressed him.
    Andre tabled his empty bottle with a thud. He still drank to pacify an invisible throng of jocks chanting
Chug, chug.
“All right,” he said. “Enough. I been trying not to ask, dude, but I gotta. What’s up with all this ‘white people’ shit? You like an undercover brother or something?”
    Nique rocked forward in anticipation, and Macon bounced his sonar off them, scanning for hostility. He was glad to find a trace. Black people’s friendship meant nothing unless they were suspicious of whites.
    “Not at all,” he said plainly. “I don’t even have one of those grew-up-in-the-hood stories to justify myself.” I’m so real I don’t need one, read Macon’s intended subtext, Nique thought. The wigger goes poststructuralist. Could be his next term paper.
    Below the subtext ran another meaning, one that Andre grasped immediately: I can