CD's For Sale

Walking through Times Square, my friend and I saw the street vendor hawking bootleg CD’s and yelling at every passerby in earshot. “We got The White Stripes, Beck…the list went on and on. As my friend and I passed, he changed it up, “We got Jay Z, Nas…”

“Who?” My friend asked him, pretending to be ignorant of these rappers because of the assumption the vendor made about the music we listened to just because we were Black. It wasn't really the music we were into. My friend wasn’t even American, he was British.