Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

Rather than know ourselves, we cloaked our ignorance—like the rappers and thugs that we adored—in the rags of self-importance and faux-empowerment. It was so much easier to mime stereotypes than to invent ourselves as individuals.