IF only Uncle Sam could see us now.

He’d roll up his sleeves, ball his hands into fists, and knock some sense into this nation of ours. But he’s not around, so someone else has to take the mantle. Some other proud American has to tell this country what it needs to hear. Everyone else is telling it what it wants to hear—and that’s not the path to progress.

When I was growing up, there used to be simple rules that we’ve now forgotten. The rules served us well, and they were easy to understand and follow. You do this, and you get that. You don’t do this, and you don’t get that. It was just a matter of quid pro quo.

My mother constantly used to tell us, “Don’t nobody owe you shit. You think the world revolve around you? It don’t,” or, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” When’s the last time an American missed a meal? When did he doubt that he was the center of the universe? If I came home and told my mother that I was hungry, she’d inevitably ask me what I did that day.

“Nothing,” I’d admit.

“Well strangely, that’s what’s for dinner!” To hell with pork; nothing was the other white meat for me.

Back then, it was experience that was the best teacher. Parents used to say, “I can show you better than I can tell you.” When we were growing up and went by the stairs, all you would hear is Bump, bump, boom! And your mother would go, “Uh-huh. A hard head makes a soft ass.” Meaning: Being a stubborn troublemaker leads to many a spanking—paternal or gravitational. But these days, parents spend a lot of time babyproofing their homes. They put foam on corners, a gate by the stairs, and plastic over the outlets. The kids don’t learn what it means to fall down and hurt themselves.

Every black adult I know has a scar from doing some shit they weren’t supposed to be doing or from fucking with something they weren’t supposed to be fucking with. I was jumping up and down on the bed when I was about five years old. Sure enough, I fell and split my eyebrow open. My mother came into the room and saw me wounded. All she said was, “You know now, don’t you?”

“Mama, I’m bleeding!”

“Blood lets you know when you fucked up.” There was no wringing of hands, no “Oh, my poor baby!” No, my mother was mad. “Now I gotta take your silly ass to the hospital. If you had just listened to me and settled the fuck down, I could have been making us dinner!” I was hurt, but I learned. Our communities are hurting, but they sure as fuck ain’t learning. From an early age, we’re not even being taught how to learn.

I only stumbled upon how to learn when I was in fifth grade. That’s when I had a hippie teacher named Mr. Boston. He had long hair, a beard, and drove a Volkswagen. Mr. Boston loved listening to fucking hippie music, and he told us all about it. He loved karate, which he taught to us kids. I don’t know how effective karate was supposed to be in a neighborhood where everyone is coming heavy, but it sure gave him peace of mind. Whether it was the martial arts or the shitty songs, he wasn’t scared of our neighborhood.

Mr. Boston was one of those teachers that always went the extra mile. Unfortunately, that was often actually the case. He would drive out of his way to kids’ parents’ houses and tell on all the shit that was going down at Avalon Gardens Elementary. Every time I’d get in trouble, he’d be over. My father would have his van parked, and then Mr. Boston would park his little Volkswagen as far up as he could get it on the driveway. Whenever I saw the edge of that Volkswagen sticking out of the driveway, I knew shit was going to get fucked with. He would tell on me all the time.

One day I couldn’t follow what Mr. Boston was talking about during the lesson. I raised my hand to ask him what he meant. As soon as my arm was up in the air, I remembered how my mother yelled at me when she grew sick of my pestering her. “Oh, I’m not supposed to ask you why,” I said, under my breath. The comment was meant more for myself than anybody else, but Mr. Boston heard me.

“Always ask why,” he told me and the entire class. “You can always ask why. Any time you don’t know something, you’re supposed to ask why. Always question what somebody tells you.”

It was the most empowering thing I had ever heard in my life up until that point. My mother may have given me life, but Mr. Boston gave me thought—or rather, he gave me permission to think. He taught me the basis of learning, and it sure as fuck ain’t opening your mouth before you know the facts. From that day and even until now, it was like a switch was flicked in my mind. I knew that I had something. I didn’t know what and I couldn’t tell what would happen as a consequence, but I knew that something had gotten unlocked.

So when I hear someone spouting nonsense, I don’t just disagree—I ask why they’re doing that. When I witness Americans choosing self-destruction, I ask why. Why is this country on the wrong track? Why are we repeating the same mistakes over and over? Why are we so oblivious? It was my MO my entire life. That in itself was enough—until I became a father myself.

I was working sales at the Los Angeles Times in 1986 when my wife, LaDonna, got pregnant. My $4.75 an hour wasn’t going to cut it, so I needed a raise. Getting a promotion to sales manager required a college degree. Having just gotten my GED, a college degree was not an option. I did the next best thing: I hustled. A dude I knew had connections in the dean’s office at Long Beach State. I paid him $200, and he got me a sterling letter on official letterhead claiming that I was just a few credits away from getting my diploma.

My supervisor, a cat by the name of Ron Wolf, knew that I was full of shit and that the letter was a lie. But he took a chance on me and made me an assistant sales manager anyway, earning $30,000 a year. That was as much as a cop. I excelled so much at my gig that nine months later, they made me a full-fledged manager. A year and a half after that, they put me down in Ventura as the sales manager. I was in charge of the telephone managers, the assistant managers, and the detail clerks. In total I had eight managers and a sales staff of three hundred overseeing Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, and Santa Maria. In other words: white, ivory, vanilla, and snow white.

My region was known as the “goal post,” since it had never made goal when it came to sales. I was the youngest sales manager in the history of the Times, and the first one to be black. I guess they thought I could do something different. But apparently some of the staff didn’t want to do something different. When I walked into my office on my very first day, there was one of those black mannequin heads for displaying wigs. In case I didn’t get the message, the note attached said, GO HOME NIGGER. I wasn’t shocked. Hell, I’d been called a nigger all my life. What shocks me is when people think we’re a post-racial society. Obama’s election was fueled by his race. The opposition to him is fueled by race—and the deference to him by his own people is also fueled by race.

I stepped out of my office and called out to the entire sales floor. “I don’t know who you all think you’re scaring,” I said, “but I’m not leaving. I’m not scared. I’m going to step out. When I come back, I want this wig head off my desk.”

I did just like I said, and when I came back, the wig head was off my desk. The Times sent its security force down from L.A. to investigate. “I got it,” I told them. “I’m fine.” And I was fine. I had a kid to take care of, and a new house. I just had to hustle that much harder. Three months after I started, the area made goal for the first time. For the next year straight, we kept making goal. As a reward, the paper sent me on free trips—with all these old white Times dudes who hated me. It was a gas.

I was psyched that I could come through after Ron took a chance on promoting me. But he never got excited. “Don’t get drunk on the numbers,” he told me. “Don’t ever believe it. You’re never as good as you think you are, or as bad as people say you are.” Ron always had these little sayings. It was like Yoda and Confucius had a kid who happened to be a middle-aged white dude.

This is around the time when I started doing stand-up. I would do my job in Ventura, then drive to host comedy shows in the suit and tie I wore for work—and I never stopped wearing them to this day. The thing is, these comedy clubs were not in white Ventura or in ivory Lompoc. I had to drive about three hours each way to get there. Obviously it was going to catch up to me at some point—which is why I passed out onstage one night, between Jamie Foxx and a bunch of other young comedians.

Immediately they took me to the doctor. “You didn’t pass out,” the doctor told me. “You fell asleep. You’re not getting any REM sleep, and you’re exhausted. You need to take some time off of work to rest.”

I was a manager so I still got my salary—and still did my shows. I came back to the doctor after a while, still out of it. “You still haven’t gotten your sleep,” he told me. “I’m going to take you off another couple of weeks.”

I got put on long-term disability at work, which meant that I’d be able to collect my salary for six months as long as I checked in with the doctor. That gave me time to focus on my stand-up career. Even though I was still getting a check from the Times, LaDonna and I now had a new kid to feed. Buying a house had taken all of our money. The only place that was regularly hiring black comics at the time was not-so-white Atlanta.

One day, Ron called my wife to check up on me when I was across the country performing. LaDonna is the worst fucking liar ever. She tried to make excuses, but Ron saw right through it. Hell, he saw through my college-letter bullshit, so LaDonna didn’t really stand a chance. “Darryl’s not there, is he?”

“No!” LaDonna blurted out—and hung up the phone.

When I came back to work to report what was happening with my disability, Ron took me aside. He knew that I had been doing stand-up, and that I was just trying to do what I could to launch my career while taking care of my family at the same time. He knew all this, and he understood. “I’m going to keep your benefits alive for a year,” he told me, “and I’m going to keep your salary alive for a year.” He did all that and more. My bonus should have $20,000, but Ron upped it to $30,000 for making goal. If there were any issues at work, Ron ran interference for me while I was gone pursuing my dreams. That window of time was what I needed to make it as a successful stand-up comedian, and the rest was history—or so I thought.

In 2005, I was playing a gig in Canyon Country. Ron came with his new wife. I hadn’t seen him in years, so it was really cool to catch up after all that time had passed. When he went to get us a round of drinks, his wife could not help but gush. “He is so proud of you,” she told me.

I admit it, that made me smile. “Man, that is so nice.”

“You know, he lost his job because he gave you that bonus.”

I could not believe what she was telling me. “What? He did?”

“Yeah. He got fired because he gave you that discretionary bonus and because he kept your benefits alive for that long. Then he got divorced. He totally hit rock bottom. It was a while before he got back on his feet.”

I was in shock. When Ron came back to the table with our drinks, I had to find out what happened. “Ron, my man, did you lose your gig because of me?”

“Forget all that. Let’s talk about something else.” And that was that.

From then on, Ron and I stayed in touch and would talk on the phone from time to time. Eventually, though, I had to find out the truth. “Man,” I said, “I gotta ask you why you did that.”

“Why I did what?”

“Why did you jeopardize your career, your marriage, your everything for me?”

“Well, first off,” he said, “if I had known that was going to happen, I wouldn’t have done it. But I just knew you had something. I knew you did.”

“Man, I can’t thank you enough. I was grateful then and I am grateful now.”

Then Ron, the middle-aged white dude who happened to be the son of Yoda and Confucius, dropped another one of his sayings. “Every time you’re onstage,” he told me, “you have the obligation to tell the truth. Be truthful, be straightforward. Never be afraid for people not to like you.”

Even though Ron had gotten hired back at the Times and had found a new wife, for a while the dude had lost it all because he believed in me. That’s why I take what I do so seriously and say what I mean and mean what I say. That’s why it’s not enough for me to ask why. It may sound funny, but to me this shit ain’t no joke. When I’m onstage, when I’m on the radio, when I’m doing an interview, I have to call it like I see it.

Somehow our communities have gotten fixated on this idea that things have actually gotten better. It’s to the point where they act like it’s a completely different world. We so want to live in the future and not the present that it has warped our coping mechanisms. I would argue that those old rules would often still serve us well. I try to pass on those same lessons to my kids, but I’ve got someone fighting me at every turn: my wife. She lets them do whatever the fuck they want, even though whatever I’ve said has been validated time and time again.

When my son, Kyle, was about nineteen years old, he got into the habit of wearing his pants hanging off his ass. He thought he was so cool. But I knew he was sending out the wrong kind of message. “Boy,” I told him, “you better stop dressing like that!”

“Aw, Dad!” he said. “I voted for Obama!” He genuinely felt that now that Obama was president, we had reached the promised land. I even have friends who say Obama is the best president in history. The only standard where that’s true is on the color scale.

I knew that my son would find out the hard way that that wasn’t true. “All right,” I said. “You’ll see.”

So of course one day Kyle did see. There’s an exclusive jewelry store in Los Angeles that I have a very good relationship with. The owner has been over to my house, and we eat together and we drink together all the time. Our families have known each other for over fifteen years.

I sold them a watch, so I told my son to go pick up the receipt and the money. He walked up to that fancy jewelry store, dressed exactly like I’d been telling him not to dress. When the security guard saw him, he immediately pulled a gun on Kyle and put him on the ground. The store had had two armed robberies in the preceding couple of months, and the guard was sure this was going to be the third. Why else would a young black kid be in there, dressed like that?

When things finally got sorted out, my jeweler friend called me. The man was in tears. He felt horrible. He could not apologize enough. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but I couldn’t get mad at the guy, either. My wife, on the other hand, got all worked up. “I can’t believe they would do that to my son!” she yelled.

Well, I could. I not only believed it, but I’d predicted it. Maybe I didn’t predict the exact circumstance, but I knew some shit was going to go down at some point for my boy. It was inevitable.

When Kyle got home, his mother took time to cry with him and tell him how insulted and hurt she was. After they were done with that spectacle, I called him up to my room. “It’s a shame,” I told my son, “that you got a gun pulled on you. But most motherfuckers I know have had guns pulled on them. You lived through it. I feel bad that it happened to you, but now you know that I don’t just tell you shit for my health.”

“I’m a good kid!” Kyle insisted.

“The world don’t know that. The only people that know you’re a good kid is me and your mother. That’s it! That’s all you’ve got. When you look back on this day, realize that you should listen to your dad. I’m not trying to stop you from living. I’m trying to get you to live. I want you to be where you want to be. It’s my gig to help you get there in spite of how fucking stupid you are!”

I want to raise my son to face the world as it is, not the world he wants it to be. My son didn’t fall off a bed or hurt himself physically. But I’m sure he’ll remember that lesson just like I remember why I got that scar above my eye. My son actually learned from it, and that felt great to me. There is nothing that makes a parent angrier than when your kids make the wrong choices, after you told them it’s a mistake. And there’s nothing that makes a parent prouder than those extremely rare occurrences when your children do actually listen to you.

I’d always told my son that if he got pulled over by the police and asked questions, to be as respectful as possible. I reminded him about what every black man knows, to keep his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel. That way, the cops know immediately that you’re housebroken. You get the rules and know how things are supposed to be. “But if the police ask you anything that you think is beyond your capacity,” I explained to Kyle, “you say two things. First, ‘Sir, I know you’ve got a job to do and I respect you.’ Second, ‘I’m not going to say one other thing. Call my father.’ I don’t care what they say to you after that, you don’t say one other thing. I don’t give a fuck if you’re forty years old when this happens. I don’t care. Because boy, you didn’t have these experiences. You don’t know this shit. You live in a world where you think everything is great. But that world doesn’t exist. It’s cute, it’s a great notion. The brochure is a motherfucker—but I ain’t ever been there.”

Sure enough, at one a.m. one night Kyle got pulled over coming home from a club. “Have you been drinking?” the policeman said.

“No,” my son told him. “I don’t drink.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“The club.”

“Well, where have you been tonight? Because we had this report …” That’s what the cops always say. There’s always some mysterious motherfucking report.

To his great credit, my son said, “Sir, I know you’ve got a job to do and I respect you. I answered every question I could. I’m not going to answer another question. I want you to call my father.”

Society will tell you that the more you talk to the police, the better shit will be. That’s not true. That’s the kind of shit they tell you on Ironside: “If you don’t have anything to hide, why hide anything?” That ain’t real. Motherfuckers get in legal trouble for talking too much, not talking too little. Don’t most people in life get in trouble for talking too much? When has shutting the fuck up and minding your own business not worked for anyone? In marriage, in school, in church, in the library, at the restaurant: Shut the fuck up! Your dumb ass might even learn something.

“I don’t feel comfortable,” my son repeated. “You can call my father.”

After twenty minutes of this, the police let him go. They didn’t even bother calling me. My son raced to our house at precisely the speed limit. When he found me, he told me how elated he was that what I said worked.

“See?” I said. “I’m not telling you shit that’s going to fuck you up.”

That doesn’t just apply to my son. It applies to everything I say. When I go through life, I ask, “Why?” just like Mr. Boston taught me to. When I see something that’s fucked up, I can’t remain silent because of the sacrifices that Ron Wolf made for me. I’ve worn a lot of hats in my life. I’ve been wealthy and I’ve been poor. I’ve been a King of Comedy, playing to an all-black crowd, and I’ve been a pariah for daring to defend Don Imus. I’ve been a comedian, a commentator, and an actor. I’ve been a “nigger,” an “African-American,” and an “Uncle Tom.” As a stand-up I’ve traveled this country for decades, seeing it at its best and at its worst. And what I’m seeing is terrifying to me. Our culture is at a point where we can ignore one another, where people don’t ever have to engage with others who don’t think the same way that they do. The tools for us to come together are themselves falling apart—and the biggest tool for people to come together is communication.

We are failing to communicate in this nation on a fundamental level. It’s not even political correctness. I am obviously not a PC person, but it’s much worse than being extra-careful about how you say things. We are at a point where people can say things that are nakedly untrue, and everyone around them will smile and nod—and then repeat it, and on, and on. Well, just because a song is popular don’t make it factual.

Communication is a relationship between two parties—and half of communication is listening. I can’t remember the last time I watched a news program or interview show where one party stopped and considered what someone else is saying. It almost never happens. Everyone comes in with their talking points, waits patiently for their turn to spout their perspective, and then the people watching at home parrot what they have just seen. That’s not communication. That’s repetition.

One of the harshest criticisms of old-fashioned education was that it only got students to memorize and repeat names, dates, and numbers. They didn’t get the perspective to know what these things meant. Well, our culture doesn’t even get that far. We’re not repeating names, dates, and numbers, which are facts. We’re repeating talking points, aspersions, and allegations, which are opinions—and dubious ones at that. Shut the fuck up!

We live in the information age, but we’re less informed than ever. The Internet is the most powerful repository of human knowledge that has ever existed, yet we’re too fucking self-absorbed and stupid to actually go out and learn things for free. Why learn something when you can just look it up, right? That lazy mindset is pervasive. People genuinely believe America is the greatest, smartest, and strongest country in the world—and that they are therefore great, smart, and strong. Let me tell you something: Intelligence is not contagious. Shut the fuck up!

It used to be that people would grieve when one of their loved ones passed. I’m not that old to remember that this was the universal reaction. When you got that phone call, your heart skipped a bit and you paused. You remembered, and you reflected. Maybe you cried a little bit. Now people’s immediate reaction is to Tweet or update their status. A human being has died and people run to express as publicly as possible how they feel. The right to bear arms doesn’t mean you need to go out and shoot guns; the right to free speech doesn’t mean you need to go out and shoot your motherfucking mouth. SHUT THE FUCK UP!

I hope this book will make people reflect, and possibly learn something. I’d be very glad if it makes people laugh. But if readers are to take one thing away from it, just one thing, it’s this: If you’re ever at a point where you’re not sure what to do, stop for a minute and think. Examine the issue from the opposite point of view, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel. And if you’re ever tempted to repeat one of the absurdities I discuss, I want you to shut the fuck up.