I Ain't Scared of You by Bernie Mac Page A

When he go in to purchase it, he goin’ straight to jail.
    BLACK EMPLOYEE: Gimme four sticks of dynamite!
    DYNAMITE SALESMAN (picking up the phone): Mutha-fucka, hold on.
    He on the phone calling the police. You’re going to jail.
    But that’s how we do. When it come to picking up the paycheck? That muh’fuckin’ check better be there.
    BLACK EMPLOYEE: I’m here to pick up my check. What? What do you mean you don’t see it, muh’fucka?
    That’s when we back up and start talking shit. But we don’t just talk to the person we should be talking to. We gotta turn around and look at everybody in the room and talk to them, too.
    BLACK EMPLOYEE: You see this shit? He don’t know, do he? Somebody better talk to them motherfuckers! I know they gon’ find
mine!
I’m going to use the phone. Hey, man, you tell ’em: When I come back, they betta have my muh’fuckin’ check—or I’ll blow this motherfucker up! It’ll be a parking lot!
    Another thing. Even after we do work hard, we don’t enjoy life like we should. Not even after we get old. When we had grandparents—
real
grandparents, not these young muh’fuckas who had kids when they was little—they didn’t really know how to enjoy their retirement because they didn’t know what to do. When you see white folks retire, they truly
retire.
They go get them a summer home. They go down where there’s a warm climate. They fish every day.
    Us, we get old, we don’t go
nowhere.
When black folks retire, we go hang out at the barbershop. We go get another job. One day the nigga done retired from the plant, the next day that sum’bitch working as a janitor down at the bus depot or something.
    I think back to Vietnam, when black and white issues were strong in this country. Blacks couldn’t do this or that. We was janitors,couldn’t do nothing. Those days are over. We had those days to have these days. You can’t keep bringing up the past, that we’ve been oppressed. Every ethnic group that you can think of was slaves, if you do your history. Orientals were slaves. Indians, Mexicans. Look at the Israelites. Look at the Egyptians. They had them on posts, whipping them. Throwing salt on their backs. They was rowing and shit.
    But everytime we talk, “We been oppressed!” Let it go. Don’t nobody want to hear that bullshit.
    We act like we want to talk about the past. Shit, let me talk about something from the 70s, and see what people say.
    ME: Man, I had a pair of platform shoes and a Cadillac back in the day. I used to be killin’ ’em, boy . . .
    You gon’ be like, “Man, let it go! Talk about something else. It’s 2001, and you still talking that ’74
bullshit.”
    See, we got two sets of rules. Rules for us and rules for somebody else. Blacks think we the only ones on this earth. White folks and us. Straight up. We don’t say shit about the Orientals. If I was Chinese, I’d be mad than a mutha.
    â€œThey, ahh, don’t nevah say nof’ing ’bout us! Nevah!”
    Ain’t no A-rabs, ain’t no Russians, ain’t no Germans. Ain’t nothing but black and white. All you hear is black and white issues. You don’t see no Chinese channels on TV, and you don’t see no Chinese actors.
    Hispanics? They don’t got nothing. They give you that one Mexicans channel. And everybody ain’t got cable.
    You don’t see in the movies, “Starring Hector Merero.” Naw, he ain’t starring in a motherfuckin’ thing. Ain’t no fruit stand in it.
    One lady asked me in an interview, “Would you date outside your race?”
    I . . . don’t . . . know! I never have, but I don’t know. If I likeher, shit, I probably would. I can’t say what tomorrow bring. If something unfortunate was to happen to me and Rhonda, I don’t know. Shit, if the woman is Asian and I fall in love