The Shoptimist: It ain’t the same now

In a Juneteenth special of her monthly column, hotep-in-training Maya Kotomori puts on her Dr. Umar kufi to analyze the commodity fetish of hip-hop “All the greatest writers read the Bible.” While I’m not sure who said it first, I remember hearing this phrase from my performatively and unnecessarily mean senior-year English teacher, Ms. So-and-So. While she was a huge bitch, I realized she had a point when everyone except me seemed familiar with how the story of Lazarus related to Raskolnikov’s final confession in Crime and Punishment. I was obsessed with earning her approval, but reading the Bible felt like doing too much for validation from an old white lady. So-and-So was also the kind of teacher who, while popcorn reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would look to the three (four?) Black students in the room whenever Nigger Jim was mentioned because “apparently everyone else is not allowed to say the word at all otherwise they’d be racist.” She would then apologize to us Blacks for making us read aloud and explain how we’re forced to do the labor she’d gladly take on if it weren’t for some arbitrary rule that non-Black people are not allowed to say “nigger”...