Nikonian

“My father called me ‘stupid’ a lot. Even when I’d bring home good grades, he’d say things like: ‘You’re smart, but you don’t know anything.’ I just wasn’t a big reader like him. He always had a book in his hand. Math was my thing. During lunch I’d go to the junior high library and sit on the floor with puzzle books. Now I’m a teacher, and I’ve taught every math class in the high school curriculum. A few years ago I was teaching my precalculus class, and I stumbled upon a set of numbers that generated ellipses with identical positioning in both the rectangular and polar coordinate systems. So I turned them into variables, wrote a two-page proof, and had my work published in a journal called The Mathematics Teacher. Take that, Dad.”

“When I first moved here I was living with my uncle in Brooklyn. He lives in a Jewish neighborhood. I accidentally set off his alarm one night when I came home. I couldn’t defuse it. The alarm kept screaming: ‘Burglary! Burglary! Burglary!’ I was the only black person in the neighborhood at the time, so I panicked. I knew it didn’t look good. And I didn’t want to die in this movie. So the first thing I did was call 911. The operator was like ‘What’s your emergency?’ I told her: ‘I’m staying at my uncle’s house, and the alarm is going off, and I need you to tell the responding officer to expect a black man.’ And she said: ‘Is your uncle black too?’ And I said: ‘Ma'am, all of us are black.’ Then I fixed up a bowl of macaroni and cheese, turned on all the lights, stood in the middle of the living room, and waited for the knock.”