All I Did Was Shoot My Man (Leonid McGill, #4)

by Walter Mosley

Twill, the son of my heart, was a native of modernity. For him money was a found natural resource like the wind—or dry dung.

The problem with people like Antoinette, people who have only partly comprehended that race is no longer the primary defining factor of American life, is that they, her and her kind, unknowingly keep watch over the masters’ wealth; and that the power of that wealth maintains all the ignorance of centuries of classism, racism, and the hierarchy that ignorance demands.

It’s not that racism doesn’t exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It’s just that I rarely worry about those things because there’s a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

I gazed across the short space between us, thinking that everything we see and experience is always in the past: the light from stars, a brief expression of love.