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Jay-Z’s got a great lyric on the song “So Ambitious” from his new Blueprint 3 release where he spits, “I can’t base what I’m gonna be off of what everybody isn’t.”

Naturally, I started thinking about the movie The Wizard of Oz. In that flick, four travelers, all lacking in at least one capacity, decide to journey to see an all-powerful wizard that holds in his hands, basically, the power of life and death.

When our travelers greet this magnificently projected wizard, they are frightened and amazed by an astonishing technical display of artificial omnipotence. Then Toto the dog draws a curtain back to reveal that the force behind this “wizard” is actually a wrinkled white geezer that couldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight.

Now, I’m not trying to argue that racial hatred and racial violence don’t exist. That would be insane. What I’m wondering, however, is if racism really exists or if it is indeed like the idea of “white supremacy”; a concept so laughably absurd that it is dashed to ribbons every time Venus Williams serves a tennis ball?

And no, the election of Barack Obama hasn’t made me into one of them Spooks that now want to join hands with everybody and sing, “I Gotta Feeling“. Anybody that knows anything about history knows that there have already been 5 Black presidents.

But what I’m wondering now is if the concept of “racism” hasn’t been used as a scarecrow to keep non-whites from even attempting to do certain things (like elect our Blackest president yet).

And now that this  latest curtain has been drawn back to reveal our “wizard” for what he truly is, do we continue to believe that we need to petition this bozo to get what we want, or do we, like Dorothy, The Tin Woodsman, The Cowardly Lion and The Scarecrow realize that the power to effect the change we need has been ours all along?