the last book I ever read (The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty, excerpt five)

from The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty:

That wintery day in the segregated state of Alabama, when the Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, she became known as the “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.” Decades later on, a seasonally indeterminate afternoon in a supposedly unsegregated section of Los Angeles, California, Hominy Jenkins couldn’t wait to give up his seat to a white person. Grandfather of the post-racial civil rights movement known as “The Standstill,” he sat in the front of the bus, on the edge of his aisle seat, giving each new rider of the once-over. Unfortunately for him, Dickens is a community as black as Asian hair, as brown as James, and after forty-five minutes of standing-room-only, all-minority ridership, the closest he got to a white person was the dreadlocked woman who got on at Poinsettia Avenue toting a rolled-up yoga mat.