I first heard Richard Pryor back in 1979 or 1980--I was nine or ten. My brothers and I were at my cousins's house in Portales, N.M., and all the adults were away, My cousin Tim put on a record. All I heard was "fuck," "shit," "pussy," "pussy," "suck my dick," "pussy" and "nigger." I didn't know what to make of it, but the audience on the record was laughing, so I did as well.

In 1981-1982, I attended Lincoln Academy in Kansas City, Mo. This was the school's second year as a college prep magnet, and the school district claimed that 20 percent of the students were white. Looking back, I think that figure was high, but it didn't matter much to me. The only time I really noticed it was when a white kid (I'm white, too, in case you haven't guessed) told me "They're only playing black music, so I'm not going on the floor" during a school dance.

When you consider that back in 1982 Earth, Wind and Fire was "black," Chicago was "white," and that EWF and Chicago have spent the last two summers touring together, you might understand the silliness of that argument. As a music critic who has reviewed everything from classical to jazz to hip hop to rap to folk to death metal (and just about everything else around), I find that statement to be less and less defensible every day.

But my experiences at Lincoln did teach me a little bit about what it meant to be black, poor and pissed off. There's a small part of little ol' rich white me that remains black, poor and pissed off to this day. And so, when I started really paying attention to old Richard Pryor albums when I was in high school, I understood.

Pryor made fun of white people. He made fun of black people. But most of all, he made fun of our society. This is my favorite Richard Pryor "joke":

"Why do you black guys always hold your 'things'?"

"'Cause you done took everything else, motherfucker!"

It's funny. So funny that it still makes me cry some 20 years after I heard it for the first time.

Like I noted, I'm not one of those white folks who experienced "black culture" through Pryor. Rather, I identified with his characters: the down-and-outers and the never-will-be-ers. Not that I was one of them, per se (two words I'm pretty sure he never used), but that I knew where he was coming from. I knew the people he talked about.

One of the great failings of late 20th century liberalism is a paternalistic view of race: Black people need to be helped or saved or whatever. Folks down here in Durham, N.C. will tell you that plenty of black folks do just fine on their own. And they do.

But there are still plenty of white folks who don't consider black folks "people." Most instructive is the anecdote John Hope Franklin tells about the night he received the Medal of Freedom in Washington, D.C. After the ceremony, a white lady handed him her ticket and asked him to get her coat.

Despite his life story (and it is astounding), John Hope Franklin doesn't tell that story to illustrate how downtrodden he feels. He shares it to illustrate that we still have a ways to go when it comes to racial relations. Richard Pryor, in a completely different forum (and vernacular), said the same thing. He wasn't bitter, despite his often biting humor. He was a black man who made it big. Who made it big as a black man telling black jokes. He couldn't be bitter. But he never stopped finding ways to tell us a little bit more about ourselves. And while the last 20 years of his life have been nearly silent due to complications from MS, his humor and observations about life will continue to resonate and inform.

Jon Worley remembers the one good joke in Moving, where Pryor "misfired" and gave his boss the index finger instead of the middle finger.