Q: Change takes time. People have to be educated.

A: I agree.

Black people have to educate black people.

A white person can't do it.

Spike Lee can say, "Let's face it--the brothers is ig'orant." But I can't.

One thing white people could do is stop having a double standard. That's no favor to black people. Letting the unqualified slide. Just because they used to hold the qualified down.

That's overcompensating.

It makes real achievement suspect. Real talent suspect. It's an insult.

Q: I wonder why white people want to show preferential treatment to black people. White corporate executives, white educators, people in government.

A: I don't know.

I heard one person say on talk radio that they feel guilty about not having been a part of the civil rights movement--one of the most honorable things a generation ever did--and want to establish their credentials after the fact. Like they were Freedom Riders. They were on the bus.

They had the fire hoses turned on them, the German Shepherd dogs.

Q: All the people who claimed they were at Woodstock wouldn't fit in Woodstock.

A: Something like that.

I wasn't at Woodstock.

I hated Woodstock.

Head-band people. Let's all get drunk and go naked, and lie in a great big pile.

Q: R. Crumb said he got snubbed at the love-in.

A: That's me. I was at home, cartooning.

I was in the woodshed, practicing.

I thought you should learn to draw before you tried to paint.

I thought it was too easy.

I didn't think rock and roll was an advance, from jazz. I thought it was a step backwards.

I thought jazz, sex, and dope were superior to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

Q: And now you're into sex, drugs, and Flatt and Scruggs.

A: Not Flatt and Scruggs compared to jazz.

But certainly Flatt and Scruggs compared to countrypolitan light-shows and hat-acts.

Actually, I'm into sobriety, a little light exercise, to keep the pounds off, and a good night's sleep.

Q: There are people who would say you are crazy to claim blacks get preferential treatment, or that there's a double standard that favors blacks.

Man, are you nuts?

A: Are these the people who say there aren't enough blacks on television?

I wonder what television they are watching.

I wonder how many blacks would be enough.

I like diversity, myself.

I wouldn't want to live in a community where there weren't any blacks, or weren't enough blacks that they felt comfortable expressing their blackness.

I like black music, black food, black humor, black dress, black style.

But I didn't like living in Atlanta.

Black people controlled city and county government and the media made excuses for their not running things right. For things falling apart while people in suits didn't do their jobs. Black people in suits.

When Brenda's Feed and Seed man in Wewahitchka asked me how I liked living in Atlanta, I said, "A lot of black people in Atlanta."

He said, "When a black person dies in Georgia, they don't go to heaven, they go to Atlanta."

Neither one of us used the N word. But both of us knew what the other meant. Atlanta is not a good place for a white person to live. It gets oppressive.

Q: Think how it must feel to a black person to live in a majority white city.

A: Of course. And probably the white suits don't do their jobs. Nobody does his job anymore. I don't like white people any better.

It's oppressive living around white people.

White people are the cause of it all.

White people gave us George Bush.

I'm not proud to be white.

I'm just barely proud to be an American. And it wasn't black people who did that. Made me unproud. It was white people.

I started calling Atlanta Black Experience Citizen Heaven, Georgia.

Why do you think the black experience is any better than my experience, sir?

Do you see my experience reflected in our literature?

No, I am the oppressor, and it's okay to fuck over me because I am (1) the beneficiary of white privilege, and (2) prima facie, a racist. Whereas people playing the race card, the sex card, the handicapped card, aren't. They have been victimized by me. I am just getting my richly-deserved comeuppance. Turnabout's fair play.

Q: Turnabout is fair play.

A: You're up there and I'm down here.

I must have amnesia about being on top. About using my race and sex to get an unfair advantage. It must have slipped my mind, Jack.

Where'd a boy like me get $20? I worked for it. And then they took it away from me and gave it to someone who didn't have $20. And wanted it.

I am baffled.

Mostly, I'm baffled.

Why are people treating me like this?

What did I do to them?

Q: Chester Himes said the way to destroy a man is not value what he does.

They're doing this to you to destroy you.

Because they don't like what you have to say.

About them.

A: Who is?

Q: Dem. Them. To ask the question is to answer it.

A: That's too scary.