Very few of us had anything like a real desire to be ourselves, to create ourselves. It was so much easier to receive direction from “above,” and where I was from, above was the street, and the direction came from the rappers and thugs and hoes who were the grand inquisitors of the Real. They were the high priests and priestesses of hip-hop culture, which had become our religion and our opiate—really, our master, our new and terrible master. I had never known anyone my age and who looked like me who had read Dostoyevsky, but in his strange Russian world, I caught unmistakable glimpses of my
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