And if an increasingly pluralistic America ever decides to commission a new motto, I’m open for business, because I’ve got a better one than E pluribus unum. Tu Doris, TU per dis. . . You snooze, you lose.

— Paul Beatty

Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between “guilty” and “innocent.” Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn’t I be “neither” nor “both”? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, “Your Honor, I plead human.

— Paul Beatty

Heroes. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them.

— Paul Beatty

In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"" For real?"" What's your source material, nigger?"" The Pew Research Center." Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades." I was wondering what that LI'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.

— Paul Beatty

I stared in awe at the Lincoln Memorial. If Honest Abe had come to life and somehow managed to lift his bony twenty-three-foot, four-inch frame from his throne, what would he say? What would he do? Would he break-dance? Would he pitch pennies against the curbside? Would he read the paper and see that the Union he saved was now a dysfunctional plutocracy, that the people he freed were now slaves to rhythm, rap, and predatory lending, and that today his skill set would be better suited to the basketball court than the White House?

— Paul Beatty

It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.

— Paul Beatty

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

— Paul Beatty

Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the DJ up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights.

— Paul Beatty

Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.

— Paul Beatty

The only people discussing “race” with any insight and courage are loud middle-aged white men who romanticize the Kennedy's and Motown, well-read open-minded white kids like the tie-dyed familiar sitting next to me in the Free Tibet and Boba Fett T-shirt, a few freelance journalists in Detroit, and the American hikikomori who sit in their basements pounding away at their keyboards composing measured and well-thought-out responses to the endless torrent of racist online commentary.

— Paul Beatty