(FORTUNE Small Business) – ego trip, the magazine-cum-media-powerhouse that I helped create, has been a study in sacrifice since day one. We've seen contributors work sans salary, used computers loaned to us by our interns, and survived eight (count 'em) office moves in ten years. But we've stuck around because, as people of color, we understand the inherent worth of controlling our art and being ourselves. Plus, the freedom to make fun of white people without losing ad dollars is a feeling equivalent to the moment nudists drop their drawers at a clothing-optional retreat.

It's been almost ten years since two aspiring music scribes from Queens, N.Y., Sacha Jenkins (a black man with a Haitian mom) and Elliott Wilson (a black man with a Greek-Ecuadorian mom), co-founded ego trip magazine. (I, a Chinese man from Boston, tagged along as co-conspirator.) We were armed with a small personal loan from a friendly white man and a multiracial vision of a smarter alternative to such uppity mainstream mags as Rolling Stone, The Source, Spin, and Vibe. Employing an "us vs. them" attitude ("them" being the not-as-cool-as-they-think-they-are monthlies that are too corporate to take chances), ego trip dared to do what others were years from doing, blending hip-hop and rock & roll journalism.

One of our calling cards: using music and an irreverent attitude to discuss racial issues, with features like Ignorant Rhyme of the Month, a celebration of crude but funny rap lyrics, and "A Survival Guide to the Rap Industry." ("Rule #1: Don't smack up your A&R [the guy at the record label who discovers new talent]. Sure, he's a Caucasian wannabe rapper who's only living out his ghetto fantasies by hanging with people he'd normally have nothing to do with. But remember, this idiot holds the keys to your future. Mess him up, and you'll be back at Blimpie's, slinging cold cuts.") Best of all, we weren't pigeonholed as "hip-hop writers," instead covering everyone from PJ Harvey to Mötley Crüe. (An ethnic journalist covering rock & roll? Now, that was progress.)

Then something weird started happening. By 1996 the mainstream magazines took notice and began hiring us. Frankly, it was a schizophrenic existence. By day we wrote and edited relatively straightforward if well-paying features and reviews about people we weren't vaguely interested in. But after hours, ego trip was our labor of love and probably kept us all from going postal.

The magazine folded in 1998 when we decided it made more sense to branch out and leave behind the stressful, low-income world of independent publishing. The next year St. Martin's Press published ego trip's Book of Rap Lists, the ultimate rap fan's handbook. Last year, reflecting our growing obsession with race, we published our acclaimed follow-up tome of racial satire, ego trip's Big Book of Racism! (ReganBooks, 2002). Filled with stuff like "Conspiracism: Finding the Hidden Hate in Ordinary, Everyday Things" (e.g., "Ivory Soap: The Great White Wash") and "Cameron Diaz Versus Christina Aguilera: ¿Who's More Latin?" we presented the idea that race is the new pornography, a fascinating taboo that America still has problems talking about openly. Since our staff had evolved years ago into an interracial puree with the additions of Mexican writer Gabriel Alvarez and black Vietnamese art director Brent Rollins, we had cover to satirize pretty much every ethnic group, not just Anglos ("10 Items Found in Every Asian Home Not Worth Stealing: #3. DOS 5 1/4" Floppy Disks").

We may have kept it too real for some--conservative blowhard Bill O'Reilly condemned the book as a "mistake"--but it led to a spinoff television program. We're currently developing TV Race Riot!, a sly look at the trials and triumphs of minorities on the idiot box, for the VH1 network.

So there you have it. We founded ego trip because we wanted to say the stuff you couldn't say in the mainstream. Now the mainstream is coming to us, and we're saying those things before a larger audience than we ever would have had at Spin or The Source. Like black-Haitian-Greek-Ecuadorian-Chinese-Mexican-Vietnamese Frank Sinatras, we did it our way.