Pioneering comedy writer Anne Beatts's take on a president who was funny without trying

A leviathan of corruption too big for a single fall guy

“The public image of an abortionist was of an evil, leering, drunken, perverted butcher at worst, and a cold, mysterious, money-hungry Park Avenue price-gouger at best. And then there was Dr. Spencer with his clinic on the main street of a small American town, who believed in abortions, and who was kind”

“Given that black folks make art and mar­ket it within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, none of us can ignore the reality that any black person who wants to create a product with mass crossover appeal must do some serious soul-searching”

“I am sure of this: the resistance blacks and nonwhite Latinos have experienced to their upward mobility is called racism and thus far Afrocentrism and multiculturalism seem an inadequate response to it.”

“If there’s any legacy of ’60s Black Nationalism I find ennobling and empowering, it’s that movement’s Pan­-Afrikanist embrace of Black folk every­where as brother and sister.”

“Unity cannot be an end in itself. The emphasis on it in the past two decades has been a sign of the intellectual and moral chaos in which black America finds itself. Only the weak insist on being agreed with.”

While Coltrane and Professor Griff and Marian Anderson and N.W.A and Sojourner Truth and George Schuyler and Angela Davis and Michael Jackson, Bigger Thomas and Clarence Thomas are all African American, they may not all be “black.”

“Tamu was shot and killed in a robbery attempt, and yes, I do know about the statistics, but aren’t those who are black and young and beautiful and vibrant and loud and sassy and talented somehow exempt?”

“To put it crudely, America would not exist without 244 years of black slavery, 85 years of Jim and Jane Crow, and now, one of two black kids caught in a violence-infested life of poverty.”