May 3, 1997:

Called 9-1-1 this morning at 02:34:42 and reported that my house was on fire. The fire trucks arrived at 02:45:01. I showed them the time on my stopwatch. It took over ten minutes for them to arrive. How long would it take them to arrive if a white man called? When I asked them, they became quite rude and belligerent, as did the neighbors, who apparently are too racist and bigoted to understand that the only way to really test the response time for the fire department is to call them in the middle of the night. Obviously, I know the sirens are going to be loud. I’ve seen a fire truck before. Do they think an African-American male hasn’t seen a fire truck? When I called my attorney a few minutes later to inform him of this event . . .

Oct. 9, 1999:

. . . when I distinctly remembered ordering the 1962 Montrose, which to my palate is a lot more approachable. So when the sommelier brought the 1963 — I guess he thought a black man in America couldn’t tell the difference between a closed, tannic ’63 Bordeaux and an open, relaxed, fully developed soft fruit ’62 — I demanded an explanation. Which — typically for someone of his high-forehead, deep-eye-furrow skull construction — he found baffling. He was about to become belligerent when I decided to become belligerent, and I sent the racist back to the restaurant’s cellar for the 1962 Montrose, which, ironically enough, when it was properly opened and decanted (another encounter with racism!), I found slightly past its prime. The redolent nose of brambles, ground meat, cigar box, and blackberry jam wasn’t quite all there, as I had anticipated, and I punished the bigot who served it by neglecting to leave a tip, which of course led me to deliver another much-deserved disquisition on racism as I waited for my BMW 750il to be brought by the racist valet, who had eyed me suspiciously earlier in the evening . . .

Jan. 14, 2004:

. . . like a lot of Chinese. Typical. They’re all basically racists, especially the ones that look at you with that blank Oriental expression, like an “I don’t know why you’re so angry, Mr. Angry Black Man, we’re from China, stop yelling” type thing. Well, I’m not falling for it. No sir. I did so order the orange chicken, and when I got home and unpacked the take-out bag to find no orange chicken, I did the only rational thing an African-American man in my position could do. I called my attorney. We spent most of that afternoon drawing up the lawsuit and filing the papers, and were so absorbed by this that neither one of us noticed the Chinese food on the counter, getting cold. That meant another call to the Oriental bigots for another order of General Tso’s beef with broccoli, steamed pork dumplings, house-special fried rice, and of course orange chicken, which is my favorite. When I got into the car to drive to the restaurant to pick up the order, though, I discovered a container of orange chicken in the passenger-side seat well. It must have rolled out of the bag, which is why it wasn’t there when I unpacked the order in the kitchen. At which point, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I drop my lawsuit against the racist restaurateurs because, technically, they included the orange chicken in my order? Or do I persevere because, generally speaking, Asians are bigots and this could be a useful teaching moment? I pondered this as I ate the cold orange chicken in the car and realized that African Americans in America are often faced with these kinds of issues . . .

April 9, 2008:

Called 9-1-1 early this morning to report a serial killer in my home at 04:52:01. The cops arrived at 04:59:01, which is better than the fire department, I guess, but still suggests that the police department is perfectly comfortable taking seven whole minutes to get to the scene of a violent crime and letting a black man get murdered by a serial killer. They were quite disturbed to be shown the evidence of their racism — I was on the front lawn when they arrived, sirens wailing and guns drawn, with my stopwatch in hand — and threatened me with brutality, coercion, and something called “a false-alarm citation,” which is Jim Crow all over again. Of course the neighbors were upset, but it’s hardly my fault that in America racist cops take hours to answer calls from black men . . .

July 10, 2009:

. . . and the president and I both realized, as we rode together in Air Force One, that racism in America is getting worse and worse. “Look down there,” I said, as we flew over some awful middle-class housing development. “Racists as far as the eye can see.” He nodded sagely. “And God, they’re all so tacky,” I added.