Go to any barbershop, beauty salon, or HBCU in America and you’ll hear beaucoup Black folks chopping it up about stuff that’s Black. And what with Chili’s baby-hair line, the monstrosity that is the Basketball Wives show (why for come its called Wives when there’s only one actual current wife and she’s fixin’ to get divorced), and crime in the Black part of town, a lot of us are right. But, there are some things that we lay claim to that really ain’t as Black owned as we’d like to think.

Such as?

Glad you asked.

And it goes a little something like this.

1) Kool – Aid

Before the commercial featured a Black family singing red Kool-Aid carols and waxing poetically about cabinetry, it was a white family doing the same thing. Hell, there’s a reason they sell it 10 packs for a dollar.

White people are poor too.

In fact…peep this:

2) Soul Food

Maybe upnorf White folks don’t rock with Ceelo Green and Khujo Goodie, but down South, we all eat the same sh*t. Sure, some of the seasonings might be different but Becky Sue Ann and Quiltaynket Jenkins are both eating the same thing for Thanksgiving in the Mississippi Delta: chitlins. Or chitterlings for you bougie ninjas who manage to think you can be both bougie and eat pig intestines at the same time. Yousonasty. Oh, and you can’t.

Speaking of food…

3) Grits

While I personally can’t stand grits, I realize that it’s part of the Black national food trifecta of chicken, fish, and grits. And yes I just made it up. Lucky for you I’m still sexxy. Anyway, its a popular misconception that grits is a Black dish. No. It’s a poor dish. Poor white and Black folks have been sharing poor stories over grits for eons. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what started the abolitionist movement – some white chap wanting to make sure he could get as much grits as possible after he moved up North and made something of himself. And you thought the Underground Railroad was about freedom. Naw, son. That sh*t was about grits.

4) Ridiculous Names

Sure we tend to get WAY more creative with our ridiculous names than our white counterparts, but I’m saying, Apple? Moon Rocket? Chaos? Felony? You bet your ass those were white kids being named those things. It’s the same sh*t, different toilet. Us Blacks folks, we create names. White people just take something that’s currently in the dictionary and attach it to their kid, no matter how ridiculous. Moonbeam, I’m looking at you.

5) Taking on the “man”

American Revolution anybody? They big leagued the hell out of Great Britain, son!

6) Newports

Oh wait, that really is some Black sh*t. According to a poll, nearly half of all Black folks smoke Newports.

6) The Black market

Sure we like to bootleg movies Newports, batteries, Assistant Coach purses and Goochey, but them South Americans are on that real bootleg stuff. How about cocaine? That guy you know selling drugs, he’s small change compared to the dude in South America with the whole field. Shucks, they make whole movies about Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. Your boy BooBoo from 24th Street who just got locked up on a humble didn’t even make the 6 o’clock news.

7) Gangs

Despite the pesky insistence on the spreading of the Blood gang out to the East coast and the cache of the Bloods and Crips in LA, and all the gazillion gangs (under the Folk and Peoples umbrella) in Chicago and New York, Mexicans and South American cats are crazy with theirs. MS-13 is freakin’ everywhere. I hear they just started a chapter on the moon next to the University of Michigan Alumni Chapter. Add to the myriad Asian gangs in California and I’m wondering who in Cali isn’t in a gang? Well aside from Brandy, but she’s rapping now so…

8) Being dumb as being hot in the streets

Glad to say we don’t have the market cornered here since I went to high school with plenty of white kids who loved not being smart. I think we just go so hard with it. I remember sitting in English class one day and a classmate of mine trying to argue that he didn’t speak no English because that was some white sh*t. I’m pretty sure he never got the concept of irony. In a weird twist of fate, I hear Sarah Palin tapped him to be her speech writer since she’s talking that sh*t too. Yeah, I made that up. So what of it?

Hmm, I can’t have them all. Good ninjas and non-ninjas of VSB, what else do we always cite as being some Black sh*t that really runs the rainbow (no Hill Harper)?

Correction…I know your father.

-VSB P aka THE ARSONIST aka TANGLE JIG P aka GIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRL, HE A 3