“That I get.” I hesitate, wanting to respect his opinion, his honesty even though I don’t agree with parts of what he’s said. “I guess to me, we have enough that divides us and makes us misunderstand each other. Do we really need one more thing we can’t agree on?”
Grip’s eyes don’t waver from my face, but it’s as if he’s not as much looking at me, as absorbing what I just said. Processing it.
“That’s actually a great point,” he says after a few seconds. “I hadn’t thought of it like that, and it’s good that you ask that question. You’re not asking the wrong question. Is it the most important question, though? To me, some guy calls me the N-word, we’ll probably fight. I’ll kick his ass, and we’re done. It’s over.”
He slants me a cocky grin, and my lips refuse not to smile back.
“But I want to hear the same dismay and curiosity,” he continues, his smile leveling out. “About the issues that are actually eroding our communities. Let’s ask why black men are six percent of the general population and nearly forty percent of the prison population. Let’s get some outrage over people of color getting longer sentences for the same crimes other people commit. And over disproportionate unemployment and poverty.”
His handsome face settles into a plane of sharp angles, bold lines and indignation.
“I can fight a dude who calls me the N-word,” he says. “It’s harder to fight a whole system stacked against me.”
The passion and conviction coming off him in waves cannon across the table and land on my chest, ratcheting up my heartbeat.
“It’s not bad that you ask why we call each other that, Bristol.” The sharp lines of his face soften. “There’s just bigger issues that actually affect our lives, our futures, our children, and that’s what we want to talk about.”
Nothing in his eyes makes me feel guilty for asking, and I think that he wants me to understand as much as I want to.
“When other people are as outraged and as curious about those problems as black people are,” he says. “Then maybe we can solve them together.”
It’s quiet for a few moments as we absorb each other’s perspectives. My mind feels stretched. As if someone, this man, took the edges of my thoughts and pulled them in new directions, to new proportions.
“Now that, I get,” I finally say softly. “You’re right. Those things are more important, and that’s powerful.”
I look up and grin to lighten the moment.
“But don’t think you’ve changed my mind about the N-word. That still doesn’t make sense to me.”
He leans forward with a wide smile, his eyes alive and dark and bright all at once. And I wonder if this is the most stimulating conversation he’s had in a long time. It is for me.
“Is there anything that you don’t completely know how it works or why it works, but you know the rules that govern it?”
“Um, Twitter?” I laugh, glad when he responds with a smile.
“Then the N-word is your Twitter.”
He sits back in his seat, long legs stretched under the table, arms spread on the back of the booth and a smile in his eyes for me.
“You may have me halfway to understanding that,” I say. “But you will not get me to be okay with the misogyny that is such a part of hip-hop culture.”
“I don’t disrespect women in my lyrics,” he says immediately. “My mom would kill me.”
“Well, maybe I’ll listen to some of your stuff.”
“I feel honored that you would deign to listen to my music.”
I toss a napkin across the table at him, and it bounces harmlessly off his face. He throws it back at me and laughs.
“I mean, for real,” he says. “What kind of self-respecting, white millennial doesn’t listen to hip-hop?”
He laughs when I roll my eyes at him.
“Are you one of those people who thinks hip-hop belongs to black people?” I ask.
“Of course it does.” He smooths the humor from his expression. “We made it. It’s ours in the same way jazz and the blues and R&B are ours. We innovated, making sound where there was no sound before. The very roots of hip-hop are in West Africa from centuries ago. But we share our shit all the time, so you’re welcome.”
I lift a brow at his ethno-arrogance, but he throws his head back laughing at me, maybe at himself.