How can I refer to the black chess pieces or checkers when talking to a black person without them saying, "What do you mean black?”

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Oh Quora. How you make me laugh.

A buddy of mine was part of this really cool band, doing the rap-rock fusion thing. Their first mixtape was frankly terrible, it actually gave me new respect for Linkin Park, rap-rock fusion is unbelievably hard to pull off. Add rock elements to rap, or rap elements to rock, but God forbid you try to mix the two equally.

Their second mixtape though, was absolute fire. It sat in my truck’s CD player for like two years. There were these three white dudes who were all seasoned metal musicians, and looked like it. And a black rapper who had connections with Run DMZ. The band had two vocalists, the aforementioned rapper and one of the white dudes was a “screamer,” his job mostly was to just scream into the mike like he was killing your grandma and he just didn’t care.

The screamer worked the door at the bar I used to hang out at every weekend. He told me stories all the time about lots of things, among them the music production process. The rapper would bring his whole entourage to the studio, so there was a pretty fun mix of people all there to help lay down tracks.

One of them told my screamer friend, 5′6″ and like 270 lbs, built like a fire hydrant, lily white with tattoos covering everywhere you could see, to scream ‘nigga’ into the mike on one of the tracks.

My friend’s like, “really?” They’re like, ‘yeah, go right ahead!’ So he’s setting up and they’re about to lay it down, when one of them stops him, and in front of the whole crew, pokes him in the chest, and says, “but my man, you better say it right. Otherwise… we gonna have problems.”

The whole room roared in laughter. My buddy screams ‘nigga’ into the mike, and they all move on. Supposedly it’s on the track, but I can’t hear it, they buried it pretty far down the mix.