Nas’s flow is still splendid. And the argument in this song will grow more persuasive as the average quality of life (read as “quality of healthcare, educational resources, safety of living environment, and proportion of discretionary leisure time to economically necessary labor time”) continues to increase for African Americans.

If I could choose the genes, culture, social class, era, and geographic location I would inherit before I would be born into the world, I would unhesitatingly choose 21st Century middle-class African American born into a U.S. city with a population of more than 500,000 African Americans. This combination would give me many opportunities to overcome unjust yet surmountable social challenges. It would give me more than a few opportunities to do something socially and morally heroic, iconoclastic, or courageous. Additionally, it would give me the best chance to experience a near-ideal combination of pleasurable and painful life experiences.

However, if I were limited to a space-time prior to the second-half of the 20th Century U.S., I might hesitate and deliberate more carefully. Though I would probably still choose an African’s genes and an African or Africanesque culture, I probably would not choose to be dropped off in the 17th or 18th Century New America, or in the 18th, 19th, or even early 20th Century U.S. The social impediments and social attacks all African Americans endured during those eras too often caused their painful experiences to significantly outweigh their pleasurable experiences. That type of pleasure-to-pain imbalance might be good for poets, artists, or people who want to be social and moral heroes, but it’s not so good for folks who just want to live small and quiet, though morally and socially respectable, lives.

Today, we African Americans live in a space-time almost all our African Americans ancestors would prefer over theirs. Though our society is hardly fair to most 21st Century African Americans, it’s not intolerably unfair to most middle-class and upper-class African Americans. And I do doubt most of us would have to think twice about choosing to live our lives as 21st Century African Americans all over again now that we have an intimate phenomenological knowledge, knowledge of the many great pleasures and the few moderate pains, of the middle-class or upper-class 21st Century African American experience.