People like to think that being raised in relative affluence is the lick, but I don't know. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that it isn't.

Particularly if you're black, it kinda sucks balls. Sure, your English game is gonna be that much more on point; and you're not gonna have that flaw in your psyche like Jay-Z, where there's not a dollar from these TIs that you wouldn't take. But that's about where the benefits stop.

The detriments, meanwhile, are fucking myriad - starting with the fact that, if you're black, and you don't think like that and you didn't live like that, you're gonna be - by definition - one of the few, rather than one of the many.

Which can be terror on your dating prospects: Black chicks aren't gonna like you as much, because they suspect you think you're better than them - which you probably do. And even worse, as far as I'm concerned, many of these white chicks who bang a lot of black dudes just aren't gonna find you black enough - the size of your schlong notwithstanding.

It can be a terribly lonely place to be.

It's no wonder then that the vast majority of black kids you see these days act as if they've escaped some sort of miserable upbringing, even though statistics widely available to any ol' dumbass with the Internets would suggest otherwise.

Many black folks these days aren't as poor as they're not particularly well-off. They were probably raised in one of these shitty outer rim suburbs, along with the rest of the people whose parents failed to set the world on fire, but how many of them can say their shit was as fucked up as, say, Dukie on The Wire?

Probably not very many - or at least not as many as you'd think, to listen to the radio these days.

The thing is, if you're black, you can front that role and no one's really gonna call you on it. Because who would even know any better? There isn't nearly as much of a precedent in pop culture, i.e. where we get our information from, for the average, middle class black kid.

If you're a white chick, meanwhile, such fronting is much more fraught with danger than if you're black. If you get caught, people will try to turn it into way more than the typical "child of a privileged upbringing and the requisite lack of cultural identity trying to go slumming."

This broad Peggy Seltzer found that shit out the hard way. Last year, she wrote this book called Love and Consequences - a memoir about her hardscrabble upbringing as a half-Native American/half-white chick in a gang-ridden area of Los Angeles. But come to find out, she was just making that shit up. In reality, she grew up in a wealthy suburb of LA and attended private school.

I think what happened was, when the book was coming out, there was a story on it in the New York Times that ran along with her picture. And one of her relatives saw the picture and called the Times up, like, "That's not Margaret B. Jones" - the nom de plume she used to publish the book, which doesn't strike me as particularly ghetto - "That's Peggy Seltzer!"

Then the Times looked into it, and, come to find out, this broad Peggy Seltzer was making this shit up - just like that guy James Frey, who duped Oprah, and any number of other memoirists in the past few years now.

The thing is, if it wasn't for the New York Times finding her out pretty much right away, it probably would have only been a matter of time.

Just now, Harry Allen - the same ninja whose voice you hear on PE's "Don't Believe the Hype," who's apparently since been reduced to blogging - dug up a video of what looks like an EPK her publisher put together; and watching it, it's clear from the way that she speaks (isn't that always the dead giveaway?) that she hasn't spent any more time in the ghetto than it takes to shine a black man's knob and get back on the freeway with the quickness.

In fact, the main thing that I took from the clip, which I think that Harry Allen kinda glossed over in his otherwise astute analyis, is that Peggy Seltzer looks like the kind of white chick who lives to fuck black dudes. It's all there in her weight issues; and the vaguely hoodrat expression on her face (but only to the point where it's kinda cute - not to the point where you wanna slap her); and perhaps most of all, those doorknocker earrings.

You know who has two thumbs and lurves white chicks who wear doorknocker earrings? This guy.

*points at himself with his two thumbs*

Seriously, I would never want to be seen in public with Peggy Seltzer, or want people to know that I was banging her - because I'm a shallow bastard, and I care too much what people think about me. But I'm not gonna lie: I popped a little bit of a rod when I saw that picture of her on Harry Allen's site, with that plain white t-shirt (how hood is that?) straining to contain those humongous cans of her.

Don't front. I'm sure plenty of you fruits would throw her one. I know, here in the Midwest, I've seen plenty of black dudes out with chicks that didn't have nearly the same effect on my Johnson. (My bad about having to mention my Johnson in a story like that.)

Which brings me to my point: Is it really such a big deal that she was lying about having grown up in the hood? I mean, if the bitch was lying, then fine. Recall her books, slap a disclaimer on them and be done with it, just like they did with all of the other bullshit memoirs. But destroying every single copy of it that ever existed strikes me as a bit much, not to mention the level of feigned outrage from some of these black commentators.

If this broad was black and did the same shit - same private school background in LA and the whole nine - something tells me there wouldn't have been nearly the same level of outrage. It would've been like the Akon situation, where hardly anyone even seems to give a shit. Meanwhile, I wonder what's worse - a black kid claiming she had a tough upbring in the ghetto, or a white kid.

One of the main problems you see in the black community these days - other than, erm, capitalism - is black kids fronting as if they're dumb, just to fit in. On the hand, I'm at a loss for a time when a white chick wanting to be black didn't work out well for me - or at least for someone! It might be bullshit, but where's the real harm?

As our new, SOHH-bred overlord would say, speak on it.

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