Last week, Onion A.V. Club writer Noel Murray complained about the trend of people rejecting things—food, films, music—as being “for white people.” “The ‘white people are square and bland’ gag is an old one, and for the most part, it’s both harmless and healthy,” Murray wrote. “But increasingly, people aren’t sniping about ‘whiteness’ to be funny, or even defiant—at least not entirely. They’re using the term as a form of criticism, meant to be dismissive. … ‘That sounds like music for white people,’ is another way of saying, ‘That can’t be any good.’ And I do have a problem with that.”

To some degree, we trio of black people agrees [...]

Seth Colter Walls: Hi Cord Jefferson! Is there any new rap music that you have thoughts on or that you like especially? And if you say "Tyler" or "Odd Future," I will stab you in your esophagus!

Cord Jefferson: Ha! Yes, I feel like I've said all I need to say. Everybody's said all they need to about Tyler and Odd Future.

Seth: Oh, they will pull you back in before long, I'm sure. But yes, let's talk Rap A.T. (After Tyler.)

Cord: Within the past two weeks, I have developed a deep, deep obsession with a rapper out of Queens called Action Bronson. I'm more excited about [...]

I do not believe in things like ghosts or astrology or gods who care if you eat shellfish, so I feel unwaveringly confident in saying that the world is not going to end in 2012. If I did believe that, I think I’d whittle away the rest of my time at a months-long beach party in Thailand, physically and mentally removed from cable news caterwauling and any chance that I’d humiliate my mother in a whiskey mishap. I’d dance and probably ease my negative opinions on drum circles, and, as the sun collapsed over the horizon, I'd find someone to hold hands with and stand before the boiling ocean. [...]

My favorite contribution to the fake motivational poster meme is "Reinstated Slavery." In deference to those who've not seen it, it depicts a white man–a coach, perhaps?–with his arm around the shoulder of a much younger black man, who's got the netting from a basketball hoop draped loosely around his neck. The white man is smiling gleefully, his eyes on some wonderful prize off in the distance; the young black man is weeping. The caption reads, "Catch yourself a strong one."

With Memorial Day on Monday, it's essentially summer, so we're talking about it, in the series Here Comes Summer.

I knew her hair as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. Bright white and shining through the dusty windows of my office building–which was actually a dilapidated, sun-burnt performance hall stuck haphazardly behind a church–it was the same bleached shock I'd seen a week before, at a series of plays I'd helped stage at USC. At the time, I was working as an office manager at a nonprofit based in Venice Beach, where we would plan and put on after-school arts programs for at-risk youth. For a [...]

When my German-American mother married my black-American Indian father, her dad and stepmom disowned her immediately. They would have been upset had she married an Irishman–"Those people kiss the filthy Blarney Stone," my grandfather would say–but a dark man was practically incomprehensible, like marrying an ironing board. "Race-mixing," as my grandfather called it, was an abomination.

The last thing my mom remembers her dad saying as she walked out of his modest Akron home is, "I never want you in our lives again."

On the eve of my 28th birthday last month, I sat down to my computer prepared to purchase what my dad calls "proper pants." Closer to 30 than I'd ever been before, I decided I'd like to enter the next couple of years owning at least a few pairs of trousers that weren't denim, or at least not denim purchased at Uniqlo (one of the better reasons to live in New York, in my opinion).

To anyone paying attention, it wasn’t really a surprise when blacks didn’t come out in droves to support Occupy Wall Street. Despite the fact that blacks suffer from poverty and the ills accompanying it at wildly disproportionate rates, African-Americans have for a number of uncertain reasons been avoiding most of the liberal demonstrations of the moment. Blacks don't occupy Wall Street (or Denver or San Francisco) just as blacks don’t SlutWalk, or rally at the World Bank.

What was surprising was when the rappers started showing up.

At first it was just Russell Simmons—not technically a rapper, but a rap icon—his proselytizing becoming a daily fixture [...]

11. MC Breed

One of my father's better tendencies is to take in human beings who have somehow been led astray. He never once coddled me or my brothers in our childhood, and I've always known him to look at even his few close friends with a hint of suspicion in his eyes. But around loners, rejects and the generally downtrodden, the old man opens up, guffawing at their jokes and putting his arm around their burdened shoulders like he's an old fraternity brother of theirs.

The thing about New York stories that many storytellers often forget is that they can take place anywhere in the world. That's because for some people, New York City stays with them long after they've left it behind. Their time amid the soaring, sooty heaps of concrete helps define them in a certain way forever, like a tattoo or a scar from a fight. Regardless of how and where they live out the rest of their lives, everything they do will be tinged with an indelible sadness, or joy, or a sense of having had something great and then losing it through no fault of their own.

The story [...]

Uh oh. Our in-house LIBERAL ELITIST MAYBE-RACIST Cord Jefferson is back in his home state of Arizona, we have just learned from his Twitter, a trip he promised in his recent piece that argued against the Arizona boycott. There's no telling in what ways he might be trying to enliberal the local population of poorly-educated racists of that state with his "tolerance" and "offers of friendship."

I've never understood haute cuisine. I've never even understood spending in excess of 15 minutes–or $15–procuring something to eat. I think what most confuses me about fancy, expensive, time-consuming food is that, no matter how succulent the duck or the steak or the lobster thermidor, it will all soon quite literally be excreta (or, on a bad night, ejecta). I've got a lot of reservations about the fashion industry, too, but at least a $300 pair of jeans with sequins on the behind will keep you warm for a few months in the winter. This is probably why it was relatively easy for me to become a vegan.