The cameos of security for the average white: mother and home, job
   and the family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they
   are impossible. The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a
   life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. In such a
   pass where paranoia is as vital to survival as blood, the Negro has
   stayed alive and continued to grow by following the needs of his
   body when he could. Knowing in the cells of his existence, that
   life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted)
   could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,
   and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived
   in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks,
   relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory
   pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the
   character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the
   infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch,
   scream and despair of his orgasm (214).

Norman Mailer - The White Negro
(Picture Reggie for Supreme)