Black Dads Step Up
Despite what Fox News tells you, black fathers are good fathers. The CDC tells us that black fathers are the most involved with their children, compared to any other group of fathers. For fathers living with their children, 70 percent bathed, diapered, or dressed their young children each day compared with 60 percent of white fathers. And 34 percent read to their kids, compared to 30 percent of white fathers. Even that Fox in Socks crap, and that shit is annoying.
Summary
White people don’t know much about single-parent households, unless they make the mistake of marrying Bill O’Reilly. But if you want to avoid being in one, you’ll have to make do with the black men who haven’t been killed or put in prison. Don’t be too picky. The good news is, it’s worth the effort: black men make great fathers.
17
What to Name Your Kids
“We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans, they don’t know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.”
—Bill Cosby, before his recent troubles
It’s so important to make a good first impression. But people sometimes see your name before they see your face, like on a resume or in an email. That’s why it’s vital that you name your kids correctly. Yes, white people can continue to get away with naming their children “Britney” or “Newt Gingrich” without fucking up their futures, but you’re black! Black people can’t name their kids just anything.
Stereotypically “black” names cause a lot of problems. A recent study showed that teachers think students with “black” names are troublemakers. When a child named DeShawn or Latoya was described as misbehaving, he or she was judged to be more severe misbehaving than when a child was named Jake or Emily. Latoya always was kind of a troublemaker, though in hindsight Michael had a few too many sleepovers.
And it hurts your job prospects, too; the more “ethnic” or “urban” your name sounds, the more likely your application is to go right in the trash. A 2014 study showed that names like Emily Walsh and Greg Baker got called back for job interviews almost 50 percent more than names like Lakisha Washington and Jamal Jones. Researchers found that having a white-sounding name is worth about eight years of work experience.
Okay, so maybe you want your kid’s name to mean something. I get it. My name is Darryl. That means “beloved.” My manager’s name is Gary. That means “warrior.” But Dayquan means “not hiring.”
Black names sound dangerous, too. A different study showed that changing the names of a character in a story from Connor to Jamal made participants perceive the character as more aggressive, bigger, and less successful. They perceived white-sounding names as more successful, even a dude named Garrett. If Garrett is more successful than you, you’ve got a problem.
In their bestselling book, Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner had lists of the top “white” and “black” sounding names:
20 “Whitest” Girl Names
Molly
Emma
Kaitlin
Amy
Abigail
Holly
Claire
Carly
Allison
Emily
Jenna
Kaitlyn
Katie
Heather
Hannah
Madeline
Katherine
Kathryn
Katelyn
Caitlin
20 “Blackest” Girl Names
Imani
Diamond
Jazmine
Ebony
Asia
Jasmin
Shanice
Aliyah
Jazmin
Aaliyah
Jada
Jasmine
Precious
Tierra
Alexus
Nia
Tiara
Raven
Deja
Kiara
20 “Whitest” Boy Names
Jake
Wyatt
Luke
Connor
Cody
Jack
Tanner
Dustin
Scott
Logan
Jacob
Hunter
Cole
Garrett
Brett
Lucas
Dylan
Colin
Bradley
Maxwell
20 “Blackest” Boy Names
DeShawn
Tyrone
Jalen
DeAndre
Willie
Darius
Marquis
Dominique
Xavier
Darnell
Demetrius
Terrance
Terrell
Reginald
Andre
Malik
Jamal
Darryl
Trevon
Maurice
So what to do? Name your kids something white. I’ve compiled a helpful list of black names and their white name equivalents. If you want to name your kid DeShawn, for example, why not name him Steve? Go ahead and try it out.
Of course, if you’re famous you can do whatever you want. North West? You gotta be famous to name your kid after your frequent-flier miles card. Blue Ivy? That’s a supervillain name. But that’s what you can do when you’re famous. That’s why if I have a few more kids, their names will be Resistance, Stand-up, and DL Hughley The Official App.
List of “Black Names” and White Alternatives
Black Name
White Alternative
Darnell
Dustin
Jamal
Jack
Aaliyah
Abigail
Jasmin
Katherine
Darius
Chris Wallace
Malik
Reince Priebus
Tiara
Ivanka Trump
Bias Starts Early and Deep
Assuming this book was too late to get you to change your name to Logan, you probably have a black name. So we know that that name will fuck you. What’s messed up is that bias starts very early in school and that’s true whether you have a black teacher or a white teacher.
There’s no discernible difference between the biases that white female teachers have and the biases that black female teachers have. Those biases start to dictate how you’re perceived in school. A recent study of implicit bias in teachers showed that teachers expect black boys to be disruptive, so they look for it. A group of teachers were shown four kids playing and to watch for bad behavior. There was a black boy, a black girl, a white girl, and a white boy. The trick was that none of the kids were doing anything wrong. But measurements of the teachers’ eye movements showed that all the teachers watched the black boy most often. According to the Department of Education, black children are almost four times more likely to be suspended from preschool. Preschool! How do you get suspended from preschool? Coloring outside the lines? C’mon.
People have this notion that black kids are bad in school and indeed there is a test score gap between white and black students that persists. And why are black kids bad at school? Black kids perform at a higher level than any other ethnicity in parochial schools. But how you are perceived becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So this bias starts out early. How do you fix that? If you want to prevent the school-to-prison pipeline, you need to hire more black male teachers. Studies have shown that having just one black male teacher in third, fourth, or fifth grade can reduce the probability of a black boy dropping out of high school by 39 percent. So there’s a big push to get more black male teachers. But where the fuck did we put those black males so that they could become teachers? Oh right, we put them in prison. Our bad.
Wise Words
Woodrow Wilson
“Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so reg
arded by you gentlemen.”
—Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and racist
Stuff White People Say
MAGA Man #2: “But, D.L.: At least Trump tried to reach out to the black community. Most Republicans don’t even bother! They know black people only vote for Democrats, but at least Trump tried. You have to give him credit for that!”
wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump made his pitch to black America: “What the hell have you got to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed—what the hell do you have to lose?”
Despite this inspiring message, Trump only received 8 percent of black votes. Eight percent. You could get more than 8 percent of black people to vote for the Confederate flag. But to Trump’s point: “What the hell do we have to lose?” What the hell do we have to gain? What has Trump done that would make us think he understands the black community at all?
It’s interesting, because even in his first few weeks of office his actions were insulting. He met with Kanye West, Jim Brown, Ray Lewis, and Steve Harvey: a rapper, two football players, and a comedian. It sounds like the beginning of a fucking knock-knock joke, doesn’t it? Why did he do that? Because those are the positions he’s used to seeing us black folk in.
If Donald Trump cared about black people, he wouldn’t have denigrated President Obama with his birtherism. He wouldn’t have spent years stoking racist fears by saying this man is “less than” and that he’s not one of us, just so Trump, himself, could become president.
He’d rather black people be football players, comedians, and rappers than to see us be president.
Next time, maybe he should bring David Copperfield in to make our problems magically disappear.
Our Racist President
Even after Trump referred to immigrants from Haiti and Africa as coming from “shithole countries,” some white people continue to claim he’s not racist. How is it that white men can be the experts on racism when not one of them has been called “nigger” before? America has always needed poor brown people to do our physical labor, poor brown people to do our intellectual labor. But Trump wonders why we can’t have more people coming from places like Norway?
Why would they come? They live better there. Europeans come to America like you go to the circus to see the fucking animals. That’s why. You come to shop, take a picture where Brad Pitt slept, and to see the fucking animals. It’s a tour. You’re not coming to live here.
People try to excuse Trump’s racism by saying that he’s just talking about the economic conditions of the countries where immigrants come from. But you can’t call a place a “shithole country” when you live in Appalachia. You can’t make that argument when you live in a solid block of poverty. You broke to broke people! When we’re talking about exceptional America, that ain’t you. Broke white people are living on rich white people’s reputation.
Our First Affirmative Action President
Give Trump a chance? Isn’t it funny how the best-qualified person should get the job unless it comes to Trump? It shouldn’t be about anything other than qualifications, except with him.
Trump is America’s first blatant affirmative action president. He’s incompetent, doesn’t know the job, has no qualifications, but got hired because of the color of his skin. He’s the nigger that everybody thought Barack Obama would be.
Gaudy and loud
Incompetent
Lazy
Emotional, flies off the handle
Angry
Unintelligent—not bright
Lots of kids by different people
Cheats on his wife
Talks a lot of shit
All the shit you ascribe to black people! He does all of that shit. He’s America’s First Nigga. So, no: I won’t be giving Trump a chance.
18
How to Get a Job
“I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And, look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu.”
—President Obama
White people say that they built America. But really, white people only supervised. They made the schedules up and gave out the work assignments:
“Hey niggers, you’re on cotton.”
“Hey chinks, you got railroads.”
“Irish, you sober up and dig some tunnels.”
And now in America, we have poor brown people to do our physical labor: Mexicans. We have poor brown people to do our intellectual labor: Indians. If you’re not willing to work as hard as a Mexican and you’re not as smart as an Indian, you’re fucked. If you won’t pick strawberries and you can’t write an app, you’re fucked.
But this exploitation of brown people is getting worrisome to white people—these are jobs that they might want if they knew how to do them. They don’t want to do them, and they don’t know how to do them, but they might someday. That’s a big reason white people voted for Trump: they wanted those factory jobs back. Never mind that if the factories come back, it’s not going to be Mexicans they’ve got to worry about: it’s robots. Automation replaces more jobs than immigrants. So they would rather try to turn back the clock seventy years to the industrial age than take a night class? They didn’t need Trump, they needed Devry.
When white people aren’t mad about “illegals,” they’re busy painting black people as shiftless, welfare-state layabouts who don’t know how to get a job. But with a giant border wall on the horizon and Trump cock-blocking brothers from “shithole” countries, America might face a shortage of brown people. It’s time to reconsider black people!
The Right Fit
When white people are considering applicants, when they’re talking about people they work with, they always throw around terms like “the right fit” or “being a team player.” The right fit usually means someone who’s like them, that is, white. He “didn’t seem like a team player”? But we play for teams all the time. We’re probably some of your favorite players on the team.
So black people can be a player on the team, but not a team player. Okay. Even if you wanted to believe that racism wasn’t a factor, multiple studies have found anti-black hiring hasn’t changed much at all since at least 1989. However, it looks like anti-Latino hiring is up—so welcome aboard. I wonder who could be driving anti-Latino sentiments . . .
The black unemployment rate is consistently higher than the white unemployment rate, black household wealth is lower than white household wealth, median income is lower for blacks . . . it all makes you wonder what could be making this all be true, if not racism. And since white people are the ones hiring most often, we still got a problem.
DLialogue
“Make America Great Again”
MAGA—“Make America Great Again.” That is some bullshit. When was America great? What time period are we trying to bring it back to?
In the history of our experience in America, it’s interesting how often white people say shit like “we want our country back.” Well, when you had the country to yourselves, you brought niggas in because you didn’t want to do the work.
What time do you want to go back to? I mean, white people were not doing great until we came along. That’s just true. The original colonists were always dying of some swamp disease or relying on handouts from the Native Americans. You don’t like welfare? Well, what do you think the Pilgrims were getting from Squanto? He didn’t have food stamps, so he passed out turkeys.
So you white people were struggling. But you couldn’t mind your own damn business, could you? No, motherfuckers, you came and got us. We didn’t say, “I wonder what’s going on in America . . .” We didn’t as
k, but you insisted we find out. And then when you freed the niggas, you brought over the Chinese. You said, “Who else can we get now?” Once you got your railroads sorted out, you brought the Irish, the Italians, and so on.
You always needed new poor people. But eventually some of those people said, “I don’t want that shit. I don’t wanna be a nigga anymore.” So then they started hating the next bunch off the boat. So if Irish and Italians are white people now, that’s just because they found some new niggas: Mexicans and Arabs. When white people say, “Make America Great Again,” all they’re saying is make sure we got someone to do the work.
The thing about “Make America Great Again” is this: Trump voters want America to be what it used to be. We black and brown folks want it to become what was promised. You look back; we look forward.
Because for us, America was just beginning to get okay when Trump came along. In 2020, I’m printing new hats: “Make America Okay Again.”
Anecdote
Crayons Are for White People
America is built for white people. Everything revolves around them, so they never have to think of what it’s like to be different. When I was a kid and I was in school, they had these crayons: “flesh-colored” crayons. And we never used them. I went to an all-black school in Los Angeles. The only time we used a flesh-colored crayon was to draw the police or the insurance man—and those are some sad fucking drawings.
How Not to Get Shot Page 9