I laughed when comedian Katt Williams began flipping out and insulting a Mexican (or Mexican-American) heckler for over 7 straight minutes on video this past weekend in Phoenix, Arizona.

Some of the stuff was funny.

Some of it—like Mr. Williams said “we were slaves, b*tch. Ya’ll just work like that at the landscapers”—was objectionable.

Initially, and after only reading about the episode, I’d been worried that Katt might have finally flipped his lid. It happens to all the great comedians—if they don’t die first, like Robin Harris did.

• Richard Pryor set himself on fire
• Eddie Murphy got caught in a questionable pre-sexual situation
• Martin Lawrence got into an argument with traffic (notice that I didn’t write that he got into an argument ‘in’ traffic)
• Dave Chappelle’s success sent him fleeing to Africa

But Katt’s routine was just defensive, the result of being heckled, I think.

It was still dangerously close to a Michael Richards N-Word scenario and, although I usually loathe celebrity apologies as disingenuous, one might be in order here if only because Mexicans and Mexican-Americans buy as many movie and concert tickets as Republicans buy sneakers.

Still, the two things that stuck out as troubling were that Mr. Williams seemed to have a trough full of this kind of material in reserve, and his attack on the poor Mexican gentleman was decidedly pro-American.

Now, I’m not the biggest patriot. I root for Ghana in the World Cup. And I regard any red, white, and blue Black person with suspicion.

I also find it odd whenever a people that were brought to this land in chains mock and hate on the people whose land it originally was.

But Mr. Williams is not alone in this.

One of my closest friends, college educated and all, hates everybody from Mexico and the countries further south. His reasoning is that those immigrants are taking American, specifically Black American jobs.

Now, of course this friend has never been fired because a Mexican has been hired to replace him, but what’s he arguing is that the jobs that Mexicans and other immigrants from further south are taking could just as well go to Black people.

“Ok”, I say, “or Black people could get other jobs. It’s not like the want ads in the newspaper are full of blank pages.”

Besides, if we’re to agree right here, right now, that there is, in fact, a ‘Black Agenda’, then it must be independent of considerations for any other people.

We’re supposed to be watching the throne, not the border.

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I’m criticized incessantly at my Factotum-type day gig—well, actually not at the gig, because I’m the HNIC there, but every month we have this thing, a Manager’s call, where bosses from sites around the country phone in and discuss topics.

I dread these things like the Black Death.

Without fail, there’s some nit to pick with my site; this despite the fact that I’m one of the painfully few managers computer literate enough to do payroll — and the fact that whenever some mass e-mail goes into circulation detailing countrywide site deficiencies — my site never makes the list.

I try not to let this piss me off but, well, you can imagine how well that’s working.

And see, the thing is, I knew that when Obama got elected there was going to be a racial backlash.

I knew that our poor white brothers and sisters who had always dreaded the idea of Black people “taking over” were now going to use Obama’s election as evidence that just such a thing had happened.

I also knew that this would spur them towards being overly critical of any Black person holding any vestige of what they believed to be “power.”

And believe it or not, it would have probably been a better thing if Obama had been an absolutely horrible president.

That would have provided people with the opportunity to say of the concept of a Black president, “We tried it, it didn’t work out,” therefore salving their conviction that they are not, in fact, racist, while allowing them to return to overt racism with hard evidence of its effectiveness.

But Obama hasn’t been that bad.

Even things that I personally thought he’d blown, like the whole Libyan fiasco, now seem to be working in his favor.

This is why the few miracles he hasn’t been able to perform, like reducing unemployment, have been made to seem as ghastly as if he’d murdered his actress girlfriend, plunged the country deeper into Vietnam, broken into his rival political party’s headquarters, fallen down the stairs of Air Force One, gotten American hostages taken in Iran, fought covert wars in Central and South America, lied about raising taxes, had an affair with a White House intern, and started two wars against non-threatening sovereign nations.

Still, despite knowing in advance that the common Black man (me) would take the backlash from people impotent to actually affect him, I’d vote for Obama again.

If he can take it, I can too.

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If you were to ask any reasonable Black person what America should do for him or her, the response would likely be to leave me alone.

Most Black people are long past a desire for special programs based solely on our skin color. Many Black people don’t see themselves in either the “Save the Whales” category nor the “Free Tibet” range.

William Jelani Cobb would accuse me of presentism, but I would argue that if, at any time during our existence here in America, we were just let go, we would have survived. Blacks convinced that we can’t survive without white benefactors would perish. The rest of us would be just fine.

So when you read that Newt Gingrich is criticizing President Obama for not doing enough for Black people, what you’re reading is a naked appeal.

But unlike David Walker, here’s what Mr. Gingrich is saying: “No administration in modern times has failed younger blacks more than the Obama administration.”

Luckily, “modern times” is specified.

In ancient American times, Blacks weren’t taught to read or write so we didn’t even get the chance to fail.

Gingrich’s argument rests in the fact that 40% of America’s Black teens are unemployed.

Consider this: if 25 states and 50 cities, could riot leaving a reported 23 Blacks dead and 2 dead whites all because Jack Johnson became the first Negro to win the heavyweight title, what’s the chance that the Obama election angered some whites? And some of those angry whites might be the “job creators” for whom we’re always creating tax breaks. And while Jay-Z’s right, numbers don’t lie, they can be manipulated to say what you need them to say.

For instance, of that 40% of Black teenagers unemployed, what percent is between the ages of 13-16 and therefore legally unemployable?

But whatever.

Listen, I abhor Black-on-Black violence, but I love Black-on-Black crime that leads to communal profit.

You want to do something for young Black people Newt?

Don’t try to make us the new Mexicans—especially when there already are new Mexicans—just promise to reduce our numbers in prison and wash your hands of us like Pilate.

Or is that thought even scarier than a Black president?

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I just nodded.

Then he said, “I hope she doesn’t get any time.”

I nodded some more.

Then he said, “I mean, even if she did kill her, I still hope she doesn’t go to jail. She’s probably suffered enough.”

By now, I’d at least figured out what he was talking about, but I still knew better than to comment so I nodded again.

“Doesn’t the whole thing remind you of OJ?” he asked.

I nodded.

Now, the imagined response that Black man would give as a follow-up to the Casey Anthony trial, a trial in which the 25 year-old Ms. Anthony was found innocent of murdering her two year-old daughter Caylee and then not only lying about it, but muddling up the evidence is, “of course. It’s a little white girl. No wonder the whole country is concerned.”

Then we’re supposed to roll a blunt and turn to BET (if it isn’t already on).

When white people invented “Blackness” as a way of suggesting “otherness” for descendants of sub-Saharan Africans, the role was supposed to be played with minimal intelligence, a narrow worldview, chronic myopia and even less compassion.

I, however, view my own Blackness a lot like I view my status as a Knick fan. Not saying that being Black is as bad as being a Knicks fan—being a Knicks fan is far worse—it’s just the Knicks not playing has never precluded me from watching the game of basketball.

See, I’m a fan of the game even before I’m a Knicks fan.

And it’s as such that two of my saddest days as a fan were the day that Len Bias died from using coke in 1986 and the day that Reggie Lewis suffered sudden cardiac death in 1993.

I was heartbroken in each case despite the fact that both of those dudes had ties to the hated Boston Celtics; Bias was the 2^nd overall pick in the NBA draft that had taken place two days earlier and Lewis was an all-star swingman.

A tragic loss of a life should be more important than basketball.

And it should even be more important than race.

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This whole post depends on a link so I’m going to post the link naked.

If it does not appear in the trademark blue of a link that you can click your cursor on as transport, copy the link and paste it in your browser.

You MUST see this Youtube.

Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vAfXNzXueE&NR=1

Now, answer the question.

Did you laugh?

Did you laugh like a fool?

Were you waiting for the N-Word?

Were you pleasantly surprised when one didn’t arrive?

My favorite “Black” joke is

Q: What’s the new dictionary definition for “confusion”?

A: Father’s Day in Harlem.

But back to the Youtube: did the anti-Semitic joke almost kill you? Or was it that tomahawk chop?

Was this not the most blatantly brilliant display of pale-face racism ever demonstrated in one place?

And if you laughed—and I laughed like a maniac—that just proves one thing…you’re racist!

You secretly believe in some of those stereotypes.

You probably even agree with some.

And then you become, like me, a hypocrite.

You continually denounce something that you actually practice.

People mistakenly think that because you’re Black you’re naturally going to be sympathetic to anybody that’s oppressed.

Un-uh.

More likely, you’re going to be so self-obsessed that you don’t even notice anybody else getting the business, or you’re actually going to be happy to see somebody else getting the business. If only as a reminder that you are, after all, a part of the human family of sufferers.

And of course, as some old Arab once said, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which means, don’t be surprised to see the Nation of Islam locking arms with the KKK to oppose gay marriage.

But what if you’re, you know, enlightened…like I am!

How do you reconcile hating racism with actually being a racist?

You don’t, I guess.

But if comedy=tragedy+time then at some point, shouldn’t all this BS become funny?

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My current Factotum-type night gig is in the service industry so when I saw Casey’s headline about the Domino’s Pizza receipt that said in writing, “Ni@@ers Don’t Tip”, I actually said audibly, “We don’t.”

I didn’t get around to actually reading the story until last night however and at that point there were 66 comments, all of which I read, which led me to understand that this was a very hot-button topic.

A few people agreed with the premise and a few disagreed. A few even touched upon what I believed to be the essence of why that statement printed on the receipt was true.

Read this study: Black diners more likely to link gratuity to service

Now, what I’m about to write might offend some people, but, what the hell? It won’t be the first time.

See, I’ve always been acutely aware of what all the Black stereotypes were and have worked diligently and tirelessly to be the bold face of the Black opposition.

Therefore, I’ve always:

1)   Stayed away from white girls

2)   Spoken clearly and correctly

3)   Read voluminously

I’ve also always tipped well. In fact, I can never think of a time when I didn’t tip. The worst I’ve ever done, and I remember that the service in this case was particularly horrendous, was leave $1 dollar as a symbolic gesture.

That dollar, I’m sure, was snatched up by my awful waiter and spent greedily, but it didn’t hurt me none (Ebonics alert!) to demonstrate how above his lacking work ethic my self-esteem soared.

And that’s the problem. Like it or not, as a race, we’re still a people with low self-esteem.

Whites think themselves Gods on earth and respond to service on their behalf with a sense of regal entitlement.

This almost compels them to demonstrate their grandiosity by lavishing a few lowly dollars on the poor soul that waits on them hand and foot.

Black people, on the other hand, seem to believe that if anybody’s working to serve them, there’s something wrong with the person doing the service.

This arouses our contempt.

Of course, none of this is true in every case. I’ve gotten some fantastic tips from Black people and there are some white people I wanted to spit on because they acted just like… well, what was that word Domino’s used again?

Click here to view photos:

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I was reading this Khalil Gibran short story about a woman that left her rich husband to shack up with a poor man and I was like, “that would never be a Black woman!”

And don’t get me wrong, ladies, it’s not like I think you’re all materialistic; let’s get that straight from the door.

Like most men of my generation and the ones that follow it, as a Black man, I’m surrounded on all sides by Black women. I get it coming and going. And trust me, sometimes I am sympathetic to the brothers that say, “You know what? To hell with this!” get them a white woman of any available quality and head off to the hills, laughing like there’s no tomorrow.

But like Martin Luther King during the late ‘60s, I’ve decided to stick around for the long haul.

And I know how deeply you ladies love.

I don’t doubt for a minute that a Black woman could love a poor man enough to leave her rich husband for him.

The way Black women love Black men has kept us all in one piece, if not in one place.

But I know for a fact that the minute Shanita told Towanda that she was leaving LeBron for Tyronne, “Wanda would read ‘Nita an act so Shakespearean that only a n-word could have written it.”

Black women, your friends are horrible! And I hate them for you! They give you bad advice and you should know it by now! They want you to be as miserable as they are.

And you’re accomodating.

I had a girlfriend in college that had our whole lives planned out together—when our marriage would happen, where we’d live, what our kids would be named; everything.

One day, I was listening to Curtis Mayfield’s Give Me Your Love (Love Song) and I got inspired by a line in the song so I asked my girl, “Could you live with me and solitude and need no one else?”

She said, “I’ll always need my friends.”

To this day, I now wonder what she’s up to.

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“In the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle. Among the whites in the United States it is only the reactionary ruling class who oppress Black people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of white people.”

–Mao Tse-tung

Once, right after chaining up my bike, I noticed a couple of ordinarily dressed white guys leading a couple of ordinarily dressed Black dudes out of the Macy’s on 34^th Street in Manhattan and into the back of a nondescript late modeled sedan.

A large crowd had gathered and we all watched in silence until I said in a loud voice,“What? Are they being kidnapped?”

One dude laughed. It was a Black dude. He eyed me conspiratorially because he knew what I was getting at.

Such is the widespread acceptance of white authority and Black guilt — that any one of a number of crimes could be playing out right before our eyes — that we wouldn’t even question. By that point, we had already accepted that a crime had played out involving the Black dudes, and the white dudes had come in to save the day.

This is how and why racism works.

We’d all be foolish to imagine that the American enslavement of Africans was done for any other reasons than financial.

If we were to be honest, we’d admit that the all-African image of American slavery is not only a myth, but also a result of trial and error.

At one point or another, American Indians, Irish, Chinese, and even fellow English were enslaved in America. But since we Blacks were always the easiest to spot, we got to keep the job.

The propaganda that Blacks were inferior, running amuck in Africa, in need of Christian salvation or in need of civilizing was all manufactured by rich slave traders. And came after the fact as a way to assuage any concerns or even compassion that poor whites not involved in the slave trade may have otherwise naturally felt.

The fact that some of those same beliefs exist to this day is a testament not only to the power of negative thought, but also to the general gullibility of far too many people.

So, are most white people racist?

Not at all.

Only the dumb ones.

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Before sipping from the Obama Kool Aid, I was dead set against the idea of a Black president.

The standard analogy that I gave went like this:

America is like a stolen car; the Indians are the rightful owners, the Pilgrims/Europeans are the thieves. Black people are like kidnap victims, tied up and thrown in the trunk. Now that Black people have managed to free ourselves from our position as kidnap victims, for one of us try to become president would be like saying that instead of wanting to escape or go home we want to drive the stolen car!

I feel a little bit differently now. Not much, but a little bit.

And it’s as a person that understands my ancestors feelings of marginalization that allows me to partly understand what Lupe Fiasco was getting at when he said “The biggest terrorists is Obama in the United States of America.”

Black people are, after all, a group that fought for this country in every conflict since the Revolutionary War despite being, at turns, slaves, subjects of Jim Crow laws, lynching victims, unwilling separate-but-equal participants, disenfranchised voters, and disproportionate prison industrial complex residents.

There is a reason to feel that America is running some sort of long and dangerous con on its darker denizens.

But beyond being turned into an immediate and unfortunate poster boy for the extreme right wing, the biggest tragedy about what Lupe said was that he seemed to be oblivious to the concept of perspective.

Like those 19 men of alleged Muslim backgrounds that attacked and brought down the World Trade center on September 11, 2001 would be, to Americans, considered “terrorists.”

To Al-Qaeda however, those 19 men would be martyrs; heroes even.

Semantics aside (what you meant was that Obama is the biggest terrorist in the world) what Lupe’s statement reveals is that he still sees the United States from the perspective of the outsider.

The question becomes not only how Black people as a whole should see America, but how we actually do.

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A long time ago, I was at an exclusively Black party and after we’d exhausted all the at-the-time hip and modern Black topics, then tackled the past and future, we all just found ourselves sitting around looking at each other.

Finally, some brave soul ventured to ask the lot of us, “Does anybody here watch Seinfeld?”

Quick, suspicious eyes flashed around the room. Some other courageous individual eventually returned volley with “I do.”

Then it was on.

It turned out everybody watched Seinfeld—or at least, everybody that had the courage to speak out. See, a funny thing had happened. The criterion had reversed itself. Since Seinfeld was now watched by those who seemed to be the cool Black people, or at least, the majority, not watching Seinfeld might have been enough to call one into question.

And as anybody Black who has differing or independent tastes can attest, being called into question by Black people is never pleasant.

I’ve said this before, but I think that the reason that so many of us are held hostage in our tastes and our interests is because, unlike white people who by curving the measure of IQ towards their tastes, interests and history and therefore can feel free to be amazed by things they don’t understand, Black people, who predictably aren’t as enthused about white tastes, interests and history, subsequently develop early an intellectual inferiority complex, causing the things that we don’t understand to frustrate us.

It becomes a self-fulfilling negative prophecy of circular logic; we don’t understand things because we’re dumb and we’re dumb because we don’t understand things.

The problem arises, however, when we insist that everyone who shares our skin share this paradigm; when we qualify “Blackness” by its alleged limitations.

Stop doing that!

You know who you are.

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It isn’t until we notice that the sentencing for Ryan LeVin, a 36 year-old Porsche driver, was just two years of house arrest after killing two people in a hit-and-run accident.

When you contrast that to Plaxico Burress and Michael Vick, you understand the racial inequity that exists in America’s justice system.

As we all know, and won’t defend, Plaxico Burress went to jail for shooting himself in the leg in a nightclub. Michael Vick went to jail for running a dog fighting operation.

In theory, we all understand that jail is for those that break the law, but in practice, we know that jail is supposed to be for dangerous people. Jail is supposed to be for people that we may need to have locked away from the rest of us for our own safety.

Then we see a man that actually did harm people—not only harmed them, killed them—sentenced to house arrest, while a guy whose only crime was against dogs and another man that shot his own fool self in the leg do hard time.

The logical justification for this stems from the very American ideology that this country had done so much for the Negro.

Now, I’ve always regretted the fact that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and for two reasons:

1) I believe that if things had played out along the course they were going, what with the proliferation of riots and slave revolts, Black people would have liberated themselves eventually.

2) Being granted your freedom makes you eternally indebted to your grantor for your freedom.

The second of those two things is what causes some Americans to say things that are so run-naked crazy.

You hear them use the word “we” in funny ways; like “we” fought the Civil War to free you people; and “we” fought against discriminatory practices such as Jim Crow and back-of-the bussing.

Sometimes, when the gin hits your spirit you’re almost tempted to ask them exactly who they were fighting against!

But at the root, that “we” is the reason that America loves putting Black men in jail.

America can’t see beyond all the wonderful things it has done for Black people.

Yet we still have the nerve to occasionally commit crimes?

Such ingratitude!

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According to Yoruba mythology, when Sango discovers that, unbeknownst to him, a deity has been tortured and abused on his land, he becomes so outraged that he challenges Olodumare, the Supreme Deity, to a street fight.

Well, right now, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump appear to be teaming up with the intention of becoming no less than a two-headed Sango.

The commercial appeal of a Palin-Trump ticket in 2012 is undeniable.

In today’s age of cellular celebrity, being known is half the battle. Notoriety due to being notorious is far preferable to anonymity. And it’s only against this backdrop that the failed governor of the nation’s 4^th least populous state – and a businessman touted for everything except his 4 bankruptcies – could conceivably be considered for the nation’s highest offices.

Amazingly, their chances are not as long a shot as one might think—given they apply the proper strategy.

In addition to their A-list appeal, what Palin and Trump would have to do to stand a chance to win on the Republican ticket in 2012 is convince the American people that, like Sango, a crime has been committed on their land and that they were unaware of the crime at the time.

Anybody who couldn’t see Donald Trump’s “birther” fixation as one of these attempts missed the point.

I’m curious as to what else these two have up their sleeves.

For the Americans that Palin and Trump plan to target, watching President Obama as of late must be like watching the least-liked member of your favorite basketball team enter the game with the team down and start launching three-pointer after three-pointer.

You scream “No!” every time he shoots one, but then he makes them.

How do you respond? Are you simply happy for the team? Are you happy, but would you rather have had a player that you liked more make the same shots? Or do you dislike that particular player so much that you’d actually root against your own team just to see that player fail?

Palin and Trump are hoping that most Americans fall into the last two categories.

As for the Yoruba myth, Oxala, the tortured and abused deity himself, rebukes Sango for his blasphemy.

Let’s hope that the American people give Ms. Palin and Mr. Trump’s political aspirations an ending just as African.

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The most telling thing, I think, about a couple of the recent come-ons by white political figures towards women of color, Black women especially (Schwarzenegger not considered), is that they have been overwhelmingly physical in nature.

No, these men didn’t discuss Proust or quote Kerouac, they went right for the c*#&shots and topless photos.

First, Republican Christopher Lee hits Yesha Callahan with a topless shot of himself.

Next, Democratic Anthony Weiner hits Gennette Nicole Cordova with a shot of his erect member surging against his briefs.

What’s with this phenomenon?

Is it because Black women don’t like Proust and Kerouac? Or is it because society has raised us all to believe that Black women are hyper-sexualized and that the only way to impress them is to demonstrate that you have what they, ahem, need.

Make no mistake, white politicians love white women too

JFK supposedly had a thing with Marilyn Monroe; Bill Clinton did have a, um, thing with Monica Lewinski and also an alleged thing with Sharon Stone; Thomas Jefferson had a slave multi-baby mama; Grover Cleveland knocked up a store clerk and gave the baby up for adoption; Warren Harding had his side chick actually visit the White House; FDR died with his side chick by his side, and Dwight Eisenhower allegedly had a thing with his female driver.

It also doesn’t take much of a memory to recall how a couple of years ago, Angelina Jolie was running around masquerading as some kind of worldwide political influence. That act resulted in Jolie being named a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations.

But there lies the difference.

All Ms. Jolie had to do was adopt a few colored babies and we’re all of a sudden supposed to regard her as the modern day Jospehine Baker.

Those international political poseurs that treated Ms. Jolie as if she owned the shrewdest female political mind since Abigail Adams, had the same intentions towards her that Mr. Lee and Mr. Weiner had towards Ms. Callahan and Ms. Cordova respectively.

But unlike with Ms. Jolie or some other white dimwit that comes up spouting elementary ideologies, the politicians that pursue Black women don’t even feel the need to pretend to be interested in shop talk.

They just go right after the booty.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest move is as old as time.

In fathering a child with his former domestic servant, Mildred Baena, the Terminator has pretty much proven, to paraphrase the now infamous words of Denny Green, that he is who we thought he was.

The French have a term for what Arnie’s done. It’s called droit du seigneur, which means literally, the “rights of the lord” or translates to the idea that the lord of an estate has the right to take the virginity of his serf’s maidens.

Of course, we as Black people know this, uh, “right”, and not necessarily from the French.

And I always take it a step further. I always say, don’t just think about the women. What about the slaveowners that were homosexuals or child molesters?

Of course, the beauty of slavery was that in a legal sense, whenever a slaveowner slept with a slave woman, he wasn’t “raping” her. He owned her.

You could no more accuse him of rape for using his property the way he wished than you could accuse of him theft every time he took his own horse out for a ride.

Of course, in every moral sense, what he did was exactly rape.

Similarly, when a male employer puts the moves on a female employee it, what exactly do you think he’s using as leverage?

Well, if you don’t believe it’s “do this or your fired” you got a ‘D’ or lower in human psychology.

This is exactly why for years and right up until it became financially unfeasible for most families, many men absolutely refused to allow their wives to work.

And sexual harassment laws, women’s liberation and a more evolved technological age aside, the dynamic has remained exactly the same.

There’s almost no way that a male boss can have a consensual sexual relationship with a female employee.

And ladies, you guys don’t help.

Fellahs, you ever see a woman on her way to a job interview?

She might look “professional” but sometimes you might stop to wonder at just what she’s a “pro”.

And I don’t write those last few lines to knock women; we live in the kind of understandably shallow society where if you’ve got one thing and you need another it’s shrewd to at least barter the possibility of the one for the reality of the other, and here’s where it all comes back to men.

A male boss has got to realize that a hot female employee is just like a movie. She might look real and seem real but you can’t touch her.

And if there’s anything that Arnold Schwarzenegger should have known about, it’s the movies.

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My mother is the greatest woman that I know or know of, yet I wouldn’t describe her as “strong”.

I would describe her as clever, shrewd, and frequently outraged, intellectually curious and open to any and all possibilities.

She is kind and she is beautiful, quick with her wit, slick with her tongue, among the best in her field (database programming) and ready to be anything but wrong.

Nobody’s laughter is more sudden, startling, or contagious.

She raised me as a single parent and badmouthed my father almost as much as she gave him credit.

She was overprotective and underconcerned, confident that I’d make plenty of mistakes but sure that I’d pull through.

It took a lot to see her as a woman outside of being a mother—my mother—but I’m glad that I finally did and as such she was even more spectacular.

She’s fly as a teenager with her fashion, she also was—and is—always out there, out front, doing whatever it is that gets one noticed, but not because she wants to be noticed, just because out front is where you’ll find the best view of the action.

But I still wouldn’t describe her as “strong”.

She put me through college by herself and picked me up (and held me up) whenever I stumbled and fell.

And I can’t even say that she did this because it was the right thing to do or because she loved me. Not that I doubt that either one of those are true, but it’s just that in my mom’s case, she simply doesn’t know any other way to be.

So is that strength?

We hear so much about “Strong Black Women”—recently even newly crowned NBA MVP Derrick Rose described his mother as a “Strong Black Woman”—that it almost seems as if the words “Black woman” should also, by definition, have the word “strong” implied.

But “strength” is a masculine trait.

And as the psychological warfare continues that is now trying to explain to us that Black women are the ugliest women alive because they have more testosterone than other women, forgive me if I don’t feel comfortable using any terms even remotely manly when describing someone as lovely, tender and delicate as my mother.

Suffice it to say, I always believed that Nikki Giovanni wrote Ego Trippin’ with her in mind.

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Looks like I’m going to owe my friend Corey $100 because at the beginning of this NBA season, he took the Heat to win it all and I took the Lakers.

Luckily, there’s a “no pay for a push” clause so even though I can’t win, I still might not lose provided the Heat don’t win it.

But I’m actually hoping to lose my cash and for two reasons:

1) I believe that if the Heat win it this year, they’ll have “shot their load” clearing the way for my Knicks to win the NBA title next year.

2) The essence of what America’s supposed to be about can be summed up with the words: “LeBron James: NBA Champion.”

We know that America pays lip service to “freedom.” Slaveowners have given us great expressions like “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” “all men are created equal” and “give me liberty or give me death.”

Those words were used to make men aspire to freedom.

They were not, however, used with the intention that men would actually attain freedom.

A free man would be unbearable. A free man would move and think and act on his own accord.

There could be no laws to govern a free man, save his own morality.

Worst of all, a free man would be a constant reminder of the restraints that hold the rest of us in place.

But now that we’re all actually “witnessing”— and genuinely this time — a man in the throes of complete freedom, we’re also coming to realize just how vile, repulsive and ugly it is to watch.

Everything about LeBron James is wrong by traditional American standards.

The Founding Fathers would be aghast!

Not only is this big, Black buck not picking cotton somewhere, but he actually gets to keep all the money that he makes—for himself!—he’s chosen not only his own vocation, but the location of that vocation, and despite undoubtedly being subjected to just as much mental programming as the rest of us, he picked a pretty Black woman as his other half; nothing short of a fashion faux pas by the standards of today’s successful Black man.

Now while a demonstration of a free body and spirit may just be sickening, a demonstration of a free mind is an absolute abomination.

Our problem with the free however, isn’t just the personal affront they represent, but also the fact that we always have a better idea of how they should use their freedom than they seem to have.

Prototypical of this idea is Michael Jordan who famously said that if presented with the opportunity like LeBron’s, he “would have never called up Larry (Bird), called up Magic (Johnson) and said ‘hey, let’s get together and play on one team… I was trying to beat those guys.’”

Clearly Jordan’s mad that not everybody’s trying to be “like Mike.”

But back to the action: I watched Game 4 of the Heat-Celtics series and started yelling when LeBron scored on Paul Pierce after having had his back turned to the basket.

“Finally!” I screamed. “I’ve been watching this guy for 8 years and the first time I’ve seen him use a post-up move! If I was 6’8″, 260…”

See that?

Even I have to catch myself sometimes…

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When you’re Black, the question is never “what can you do?” but always “what else can you do?”

I say this because it hasn’t even been a full seven days since President Obama put the boogeyman to bed and already Sarah Palin is accusing him of “pussy-footing” because he won’t release Osama bin Laden’s death photos and posters on several websites I’ve surfed are suggesting that former president George W. Bush somehow “laid the groundwork” for what Mr. Obama has accomplished.

Yes. That’s right. The same George W. Bush that attacked Iraq and Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, which should seem really odd to people now since it turns out that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan.

America is the home of the obituary culture. We’re a nation that drives with our eyes in the rearview. Stealing a concept from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, if Jesus were to come back today and in the flesh, certain members of the clergy would likely have him killed because he’d be more valuable to them as a symbol than as a man.

Similarly, in the American psyche, all the good things have happened already. All the great men are either dead or gone.

We’re suspicious of the successful and active—especially if they’re Black—and we’re afraid that a compliment might go to their heads and make them mistake-prone so we avoid them like the teammates of a pitcher in the midst of a no-hitter.

Contrarily, putzes, boneheads and losers gain our sympathy—especially if they’re white—and we convince ourselves that these men aren’t really bad, they just haven’t had enough time to show their inner greatness.

Of course, we could give putzes, boneheads and losers chances until the cows come home (from wherever the cows have gone) and all we’d see is more stupidity, more inanity and more loss.

After Bush started two bad wars, we gave him four more years just to watch him tank both the housing and the stock markets.

With only two major gaffes to Barack’s detriment (that Libyan fiasco and his inability to lower the unemployment numbers), don’t be surprised to see your boy lose to whoever the Republicans can mount in 2012.

Ending the war in Iraq, passing his healthcare bill, facilitating a stock market rise and killing bin Laden is way more than most people thought President Obama would do in his first term, and the possibility that he might yet do even more in his next term is probably way more than some people can take.

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Is Tyler Perry a better filmmaker than Spike Lee?

Religion gives God a bad name.

Unfortunately, all some crackpot usually has to do to get a following is cloak himself in one or more tenants of an existing religion and folks will follow him like he’s the New Prophet.

And the problem is there are, quite simply, so many tenants.

Like, let’s say Osama bin Laden tried to justify his actions by using the Qur’an and saying that in ordering the bombing of the World Trade Center, he was only following Surah 2:256 which says: “Warfare is ordained unto you, although it is hateful unto you.”

The counter argument is, of course, Surah 2:190 which says: “Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.”

Is it possible that bin Laden knew one Surah well and missed the other one entirely? Not if he was as stern a believer in Sharia as he was rumored to be.

He also must have missed Surah 6:151 which says: “Slay not the life which Allah hath made sacred, save in the course of justice.”

It would be difficult to argue that death was a warranted justice on 9/11 for nearly 3,000 people, specifically when you consider that, by percentages alone, anywhere between 12 and 69 of those people must have been fellow Muslims.

Most importantly, as a holy man, bin Laden had a responsibility to act according to Surah 22:108-109 which reads: “Say: It is only inspired in me that your God is One God, Will ye then surrender (unto Him)? But if they are averse, then say, I have warned you all alike…”, but bin Laden didn’t get around to “warning” America about her evil self until he did so in a letter written in October of 2002.

By anybody’s math, that’s clearly after 9/11/2001.

So was Osama bin Laden a “true” Muslim?

Well, he certainly didn’t go by the book.

But of course, like Surah 74:38 says: “Every soul is a pledge for its own deeds.”

Personally, I’m just trying to follow Surah 2:282 which says: “…No scribe should refuse to write as Allah has taught him, so let him write…”

Amen.

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As I kicked out what had to be nearly $150 in gas money round-trip from New York to Danville, Virginia this weekend, I started thinking that there had to be a better way.

And now as I hear predictions from some circles that we should expect to see prices as high as $6 a gallon this summer, I figure there’s gotta be something the president can do—should he ever get around getting this Qaddafi thing squared away.

But wait… has the president beat me to it? Could he be considering…? No, that would be insane! But wait, I have heard a rumor… Is it true that President Obama is actually considering opening up the oil reserves?

The oil reserve, for the uninitiated, is the total amount of producible oil less the amount that is held in “reserve” for reasons of national security.

In other words, a certain amount of oil is always held in place in case the country goes to war and to avoid being beholden to a foreign nation to mobilize our military.

Given America’s currently paranoid nature, it makes perfect sense that politicians on both sides of the spectrum have taken adamant though often conflicting positions on the issue.

What’s to stop Canada or Mexico from trying to “set it” on us after we pulled such a move?

More seriously however, under the assumption that such a security breach were to take place,

1)      The oil reserves would only be of genuine value in the supremely unlikely event that another country actually invades the United States,

2)      As a Black man—Black Commander-in-Chief at that—I could only hope that President Obama would be familiar some important military history.

North Africa’s own Hannibal Barca laid siege to Italy for 15 years without a single defeat. He did this by turning all the possessions of his conquered into spoils, including the conquered Italian armies themselves.

We could only hope that President Obama, should we be forced to fight some foreign nation, would have the good sense to take on an oil-rich one (is Libya suddenly starting to make more sense?).

Also, the timing would have to be perfect.

Lest we forget that Obama is a politician, it wouldn’t be prudent to lower them gas prices too far in advance of the next election, now would it?

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Before I even begin, let me admit that I’m not entirely qualified to answer that question myself because although I’ve seen every movie Spike’s ever made including Joe’s Bed Stuy Barbershop, I’m not as familiar with entirety of Tyler Perry’s filmography.

The five Tyler Perry movies that I have seen, I’ve liked. The first Why Did I Get Married, perhaps the best.

The thing about Tyler Perry movies to me though is that while they’ve all been admittedly good, none have been, to this point at least, spectacular.

None have demonstrated any nuance in either style or form, none have presented anything groundbreaking as far as the art of filmmaking is concerned, and perhaps most importantly, none have ever required from any of their actors or actresses the type of performance that pushed him or her to the boundaries of their abilities.

Spike Lee, on the other hand, is a nut. His style is always nuanced, his technique original and Denzel Washington, John Leguizamo, Clive Owen, Angela Bassett, Mira Sorvino and Rosario Dawson have all been at their best while rocking with him.

This work itself however, has mixed results.

When Spike’s been off, he’s produced clunkers like Miracle at St. Anna and Girl 6.

But when Spike’s on, he’s produced absolute gems like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, and Inside Man.

This isn’t to say he’s better than Tyler Perry, though.

To say that, I’d have to presume to know what each filmgoer needed.

On the issue of the current beef between the two men, I take Tyler’s side all the way.

Spike was way out of pocket to compare Tyler to Amos n Andy, not even able to disguise the fact that all he’s doing is hating, mostly because Tyler Perry movies are like dynamite at the box office, while Spike’s films are more like a firecracker.

On the issue of films however, if I had to choose one over the other, I’d choose Spike.

I always want to feel passionate about art one way or another.

I’d rather walk out of a movie feeling that it completely sucked than feeling pleasantly indifferent.

I realize however that not everybody shares this sentiment.

Some people simply want to be entertained.

And at least Tyler’s guaranteed to give them what they paid for.

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If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny that people actually argue that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery, and that, indeed, it was fought over “states’ rights.”

Geniuses; the Civil War was fought over states’ rights to own slaves!

That’s what the whole secession from the Union deal was about. That’s what gave birth to the Confederacy.

People that try to downplay the importance of slavery on all of American history must also conveniently forget that the issue was so important that it was actually written into the United States Constitution.

1787’s Three-Fifths Compromise guaranteed that as far as distribution of taxes and the appointment of members to the House of Representative were concerned, 3/5ths of the population of slaves would be taken into account in slaveholders’ favor.

Think they gave any of those slaves the votes or the tax money?

Nope.

Still, I guess it’s embarrassing to admit that a country that was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” (a slave owner’s quote) and describes itself as the “land of the free” (you guessed it, another slave owner’s quote) actually had to fight a war over whether or not it was the right thing to do to free men from chattel slavery.

But there had to be more causes for the Civil War than slavery, right?

Well, depends on who you ask.

Ask.com writer Martin Kelly actually gives the Top Five Causes for the Civil War.

1)      Economic differences between the North and South—that were brought about due to slavery.

2)      States Rights vs. Federal Rights—as they pertained to the hotly contested issue of slavery.

3)      The Fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents—need I?

4)      Growth of that Abolition Movement—are you noticing a theme here?

5)      The Election of Abraham Lincoln—who had already declared that he was “personally” anti-slavery. He was “professionally” pro-Union. Work that out however you have to.

So yeah, slavery was the only true cause of the Civil War.

And anybody that tries to tell you otherwise deserves to get screamed on by Joe Wilson.

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Still, I wasn’t surprised at all to read recently how poverty rates and child death rates have been falling steadily across the continent while the McKinsey Quarterly describes Africa as “among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions.”

The reason the story that I read gave for virtually ignoring any good news from Africa was that many international aid companies like the United Nations are always on the lookout for more dough so it would be against their own better interest to tell other truths.

Maybe.

I’d like to add a couple of other potential reasons if I might.

For a long time the wholesale colonization of Africa by European powers was justified by the belief that Blacks, if left to our own devices, couldn’t govern ourselves.

Falling poverty rates and rapidly growing economies kinda screws up that notion.

Also, I’ve always argued that, as far as race in America is concerned, Black people are just a distraction.

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Sure, slavery sucked, but truly, the greatest crime committed on these shores was the genocide of the indigenous people.

It still amazes me that instead of ever thinking about leaving this dump—which bears a striking similarity to Rome near the end of their run—American Blacks would rather stay here and argue with white people about racism and other such inanities.

Why do we stay?

Well, because Africa’s a vile and disease encrusted land filled with ugly, degenerate, AIDS-carrying halfwits that are all poor and slobbering; featuring children with flies buzzing around their faces and bloated bellies.

I mean, that’s the truth, ain’t it?

Finally, let’s say all the Indians aren’t dead.

They’re gonna want some get-back, you think?

Expect us to catch a tomahawk meant for a white man as we stand in the street screaming about the comparative media bias when dealing with meltdowns of Charlie Sheen and Chris Brown.

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The first comment I came upon while researching Mr. Cee’s arrest for allegedly soliciting oral sex from a 20 year-old man was some dude writing about how most Black men are on the “down-low” because we’re raised by single mothers.

Great, I thought. I’m the product of a divorced single mother and though I’m yet to enjoy any homosexual hi-jinks, I guess it’s just a matter of time.

One thing I can promise you though – is that when I do finally get into guy-on-guy action – it won’t be out in public and it won’t be with an alleged male prostitute as Mr. Cee’s allegedly was. I’d like to think that I’m hot enough to get a guy that would give me some for free.

More seriously, here’s the most troubling thing about Mr. Cee’s arrest. If the incident happened as the police tell it, he felt he had to hide his proclivities by keeping them on darkened streetcorners, all the while engaging in the same “pause” talk that everyone else does. It points to something obvious and quite disturbing about hip hop culture—its rampant homophobia.

Why is hip hop’s homophobia disturbing?

Well, like Shakespeare’s famous quotation from Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much,”which means literally, if you complain ad nauseam about something, you probably secretly enjoy it, hip hop’s gun-blazing anti-homosexuality makes it seem, well, gay.

Why so much concern over it if it doesn’t affect you, fellas?

Another factor to consider is the hyper-masculinity that rappers, as most Black men, seem to enjoy.

Well, this is a bogus myth that should be obvious from the door.

Would hyper-males have ever been enslaved?

Would hyper-males allow the females of their race to shoulder as much of the burden of carrying the race as Black men have?

Moreover, would hyper-males seem ecstatic to glorify the beauty and wonders of every other female except the females of their own race to the extent that Black men have?

No, no and no.

But I didn’t write all this to attack Black men. I’m a Black man myself and I love me some me.

What I’m saying in essence is that Black men, most specifically Black men in hip hop need to abandon homophobia and if not become homo-friendly, then at least become homo-indifferent because by not doing so, you’re making us all look suspect.

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Don’t think for a second that the police themselves are behind the apparent upswing we’ve been witnessing lately in their heinous assaults on our fellow citizens.

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That’s like blaming the dog for biting you after you’ve clearly heard his owner yell“Sic ‘em!”

No, the police don’t have the mentality, nor moreover the authority to dictate their own actions. They take their cues from whichever political agenda is backed by the biggest financers.

So when you see stuff like that poor young man having the police try to snatch his baby out of his arms so that they can arrest him, or the young woman that was first maced by the police then dragged onto the ground by her jeans and in the very next story you learn that more black men are imprisoned today than were enslaved in 1850, you might catch yourself thinking, “Wait a minute…”

Is this, as Gil Scott-Heron would wonder, a big ol’ “C” for “Coincidence” or a little bitty “c” for “conspiracy”?

If you picked the latter, yeah, you’d be right.

Do the mathematics. Solve the problems yourself. Think rationally.

In the first instance, if the police didn’t have their current agenda, they’d have said to the guy with the baby, “Sir, we’ve gotta arrest you; so is there anybody you can call to come and get the baby?”

But no, they attempted to act out the scene in Roots where Kizzy is stolen away from her parents, this despite a male voice in the crowd that was offering to take the baby away.

In the second instance, the police themselves seem to have clearly lost respect for their own presence.

When the cops show up, everybody’s supposed to chill out. And all that the cops are supposed to subsequently ask is “What’s going on here?”

Everybody says, “Nuffin’”, acts dumb, the beefing ends, and everybody goes about their business, including and especially the cops.

But to make violent arrests during a girl fight? A girl fist fight?

Pathetic, even for cops.

In the last instance, well, there was good money in keeping us in chains just like there’s good money in keeping us in jail.

Look at it this way, between the years 1980 and 1994, the corporate profits for businesses that used prison labor rose from 392 million to 1.32 billion.

Where do you think that number is now?

Where do you think it’s going?

Most importantly, how do you think it’s gonna get there?

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Of course, the one thing that keeps America’s poor from acting out in the manner of, say, the French Revolution, is the bang-up job that the American media has done of convincing every single citizen that he or she will, eventually, become rich.

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Unlike pre-revolution France where there was a clear cut and preexisting nobility and peasant class systems already in place, in America, the illusion exists that there is no such thing.

So a big deal gets made and America pats itself on the back whenever some rapper or ballplayer from a single-parent household, strikes out and makes a name, becomes famous and subsequently almost wealthy.

What’s interesting is America does no back patting, only finger-pointing, when that same rapper or ballplayer loses it all and becomes broke.

Look at Jah Rule.

Look at Mike Tyson.

Look at Allen Iverson.

Look.

That’s not our fault, America seems to say. Them fools did it to themselves.

But did they?

Giving money to a man that’s never had it is like telling a person that’s never even ridden in an airplane to fly it.

Should you really be surprised when there’s a crash?

In reading Bob Herbert’s last column for the New York Times, I learned that the richest 10% of Americans received 100% of the average income growth between the years 2000 and 2007.

Now, if this were any other country, suburban mansions would already be in flames.

But, as I already wrote, the main reason we poor don’t burn those mansions is because we can’t shake the idea that one day, we’re all destined to live in them.

Racism’s been another great tool in keeping the poor separated.

Racism is so clever that it doesn’t even allow white people to be poor. If you’re white and you’re poor, the term they use for you is “middle class”.

“Poor” is a term exclusively used for Black people.

But what would happen if, one day, even white people stopped being so dumb as to imagine that there is anything separating the emptiness in their stomachs and pockets from the emptiness in ours?

What would happen then?

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I’m sick of you bleeding hearts whining about how America has a “responsibility” to other nations around the globe to ensure “justice,” “democracy,” and whatever other crappy ideological nonsense some of you nuts actually think that we really practice here.

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It really pisses me off when people believe that.

And let me be even more specific: it especially pisses me off when Black people believe that. We should know better.

Still, you hear us, us of all people, arguing that if a leader somewhere, anywhere, is out there committing genocide “against his own people” (God, I hate that one), then we as Americans should feel some kind of obligation to go in there and do something.

Oh yeah?

Thank God you guys specified that it need be “against his own people” cause if anybody should have rushed in to save a people from genocide, where were all the nations of the world when the American Indians were being slaughtered wholesale to make way for highways?

And if anybody should be able to be slaughtered, shouldn’t it be one’s “own people”?

I mean c’mon, let’s be realistic: Who would you rather me slaughter, my own people or your people?

Right now, somebody’s moaning, “I’d rather you not slaughter anybody!”

Agreed.

But if you’re one of those empathetic crybabies who claims to “love everyone like family” then I’m glad we’re not related.

And that’s just the ½.

Another thing that kills me too, Black people specific as well, where were all our saviors when we were in chains?

Couldn’t we have used some “world police” then?

Personally, I’m glad we didn’t get any help and that we, along with our lunatic fringe that included Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser along with great, white Homies like John Brown were able to use terror among other tactics and scare slave owners into realizing that it was time to give us us free.

This way, we don’t owe anybody.

And there’s no better feeling than not being in anybody else’s pocket.

But you bleeding hearts would rather the world be in our pocket by us giving them their freedom which is really no freedom at all.

It’s just debt.

One last note: even halfwit Black people realize that the police only exist to protect the interests of the rich.

If America is the “world’s police”, then who exactly are the rich?

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Et tu, Brutè?

That’s my favorite Shakespearean quote. It’s from Julius Caesar. Caesar himself says it when, after being knifed by all the other members of the Roman senate, his homeboy, his dawg, his man likethat! Brutus, sticks a knife in.

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And you, Brutus?

After that, Caesar just goes ahead and kicks the bucket. I always thought that was the coolest way to die. If your own people can betray you, the least you can do is shame them with your death.

Of course, most people know that almost no Roman emperor left the throne without getting murked.

One of the few exceptions, Septimius Severus, was also one of the assorted African-born Roman emperors.

That’s ironic when I think that now, a man one generation removed from African soil, is probably being betrayed in the worst way since Caesar by somebody he should have known enough not to trust from the door.

Oddsmakers are already putting a line on Hillary Clinton making her own Presidential run in 2012.

Clinton has already stated that she’s finished as Secretary of State if Obama wins re-election.

That’s odd.

Yet it was Ms. Clinton in Paris two Mondays ago doing the American-sided talking to the group of nations that ended up bombing Libya.

Now, I remember my mother saying before I was even in double digits, “They only bomb brown people.”

My mother was being simplistic, even she would have admitted to this. But my mother often speaks in generalities to make a broader point.

And I don’t remember who we’d just blasted, I think it might have been Cambodia or somebody, but as if to accentuate her point, my mom started listing bombings going back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki going as far as to question who was the greater threat to mankind, Hitler or Tojo.

Of course, over time I’ve heard that it was timing that caused us to give it to the Japanese and not the Nazis.

Whatever.

One of the reasons that Hitler’s madness was respected and feared to the extent that it was, was that that fool had the nerve, well, gall, to actually bomb London!

Still, Germany got the ground troops while Japan got the nukes.

So the question becomes, is Hillary Clinton selling out a potential 2012 Barack Obama re-election by making the man look so incredibly callous as to himself “bomb brown people”?

Or is this just another instance of (me, this time) blaming the ineptitude of the Black man on the white… well, woman?

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One of the main reasons that most of us that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, did so was because we were so sure that never again, under his watch at least, would an American president anoint himself “God” like George W. Bush had so clearly done and decide that he should dictate policy for the rest of the world.

Hell, we were already hemorrhaging American lives in two foreign wars—Iraq and Afghanistan—and we believed, well, I did at least, that this new guy would be shrewd enough to let the premieres and the people of other countries decide upon their own leadership.

Yet, here we go again.

Now, under the premise that Libyan strong man Muammar Qadaffi-Qaddhafi-Gaddafi-Kaddafi-Khadafy-Qadhafi-Qadaffi-Gadaffi or whatever, has violated a newly instituted UN sponsored “no-fly zone”, the United States, in conjunction with France, Canada, Great Britain and Italy has bombed the crap out of the Libyan coast, all while a civil war continues to rage on the country’s North African home front.

Not good.

Now, while I’m not gonna side with an obvious dictator, I will make these two points:

1)      If my brother and I were fighting and you jumped in on either side, don’t be surprised when we team up to kick your ass.

2)      If a gang of my neighbors decided that I should no longer be allowed into my living room because I could hatch some nefarious plot from there and then threw a Molotov cocktail through my window as I sat down to watch the Knicks, expect me to be pissed!

Unlike that “thing” with Iraq where a rip-off to profit the oil-rich cronies of our last president was clearly the reason that we went to war, I’m still struggling to find any kind of logic whatsoever for attacking Libya.

One commenter in the newspaper that I read online jokingly suggested that the tomahawk missiles we now have in stock must be growing old and that we’re probably only using them to make room for newer inventory.

This would actually make more sense than anything else I can think of.

Still, when our own Barack Obama says something as ridiculous as, “We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy,” I wonder if he realizes who he sounds exactly like.

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My friends are evenly divided on the Two and a Half Men star with half us being firm on “Team Sheen”, the other half being just as firmly on “Team FCS” (and if you need help with that acronym, I suggest you redo kindergarten).

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Mr. Sheen, who’s recent shenanigans with hookers/porn stars, cocaine and now his war of words with the creator of his hit show have kept him in the news lately, has been granted the media circus most stars would kill for, without the seeming necessity of any of the cleanup.

And of course, the question was posed, “if Charlie Sheen was Black…?”

Now, admittedly, I’m one of the few Black people in America that thinks that we can get away with everything that white people can.

It’s just that we should expect entirely different responses.

Like, say, in dealing with the police.

We all remember and probably laughed when white people asked of O.J. Simpson, “If he isn’t guilty, then why is he running?”

We might have even said by way of explanation, “Well, unlike you Homie, who the police might detain for a round of ‘Sir’ heavy and very patient questioning, the cops come in billy clubs and guns drawn first when dealing with Blacks, and any movement at all, false or otherwise, results in a beating and an arrest on the mild side, with death as a constant and related possibility.”

Still, nobody’s a bigger fan of the “righteous indignation” kick than I am. When white people are on it, it’s often convincing. When Blacks are on it, the results are mixed.

All it takes to ride that kick is the genuine conviction that you’re 100% in the right.

And while Charlie Sheen is riding the “righteous indignation” kick right now and winning with it so far, I can only think of two examples of Black celebrities that have ever been on it.

The first was Muhammad Ali, who genuinely didn’t believe that a Black man should be forced to fight in a war he didn’t believe in and lost millions of dollars and the three prime years of his boxing career as a result.

The second was Tupac Shakur, who genuinely didn’t believe that he was guilty of sexual assault.

Look at what happened to him.

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I was literally shocked the first time I saw the movie True Lies and one character, describing all the great attributes of a woman he planned on seducing, said she had an “ass like a 10 year-old boy.”

I remember thinking that can’t be right! Cause if that’s the case, how could…? How…? Why…?

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Of course, over time, I’ve done much more reading and one of the things I’ve come across that’s given the aforementioned weird perspective at least a little grounding in history for me has been discovering just how rampant homosexuality was among the founders of what we now consider to be “civilization”.

Yes, those great Greeks that reportedly “invented” democracy also had very little interest in women and used them primarily as “breeding sows” (their term).

The main sexual interest of the Greeks—and I’m talking all the big shots here, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Alexander the Great, was young boys.

In fact, a 12 year-old boy was supposed to have the ideal sexual body.

So to say that a woman has “an ass like a 10 year-old boy” could actually be considered a compliment by that line of thinking because you’re essentially saying that she’s just ripening.

How’d this all begin to change?

Well, the irony is that Catholicism—which is now considered to be almost synonymous with homosexual pedophilia—actually did away with that day’s indifference to homosexuality by making it a “sin”.

Still, when you see some boy-bodied female model in a fashion industry run and controlled by gay white men, it’s easy to believe that that line of thinking hasn’t completely disappeared.

But RK Byers, what is your point?

And how fool, if it does at all, does it relate to Black women?

Well, all I’m saying is this: to my knowledge, I’m not a descendant of Greeks. Nor are most Black people that I know. And luckily, Black and white tastes in the female form don’t run parallel.

So it would probably be in our better interest to judge Black women’s bodies along our own scale.

This isn’t to say that some bloated pig should get a pass just cause she’s a Black woman. This is, however, to allow for the things that we like, like some hips and some booty.

I write all this because that porcine lunatic Rush Limbaugh just attempted to slight our first lady Michelle Obama as being overweight because she indeed has a couple of our favorites: hips and booty.

Rush, we know what your ideal sex partner is, and like Austin Powers would say, “It’s a man, man!”

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Is it ok for Black people to be racist?

One of the reasons, I think, that America is so obsessed with celebrity isn’t because we worship them, it’s because we’re looking for flaws.

We wanna see cellulite on Kim Kardashian’s ass or we wanna hear how lousy a husband Steve Harvey was to his ex-wife just so that we can feel better about ourselves by comparison.

Similarly, there’s always a rush to believe that a Black man stands guilty of anything that he’s been accused of no matter what the charge or crime.

American Black men are boogeymen. That’s our designated role.

But why is this the case?

Well, any racist knows deep down that his position is illogical so he’s always in search of “evidence” to back his preposterous ideology.

This means that any time a Black man stands accused, some racist somewhere is excitedly screaming “See!” and feeling that his point has been proven (again).

So it only makes sense that Brooklyn nun Mary Turcotte fabricated a tale and suggested that instead of the consensual sex that she actually had with some random bodega guy, she was raped by a 6’4″ Black man between the ages of 40-50.

All she was doing was giving the people what they wanted.

Every stereotype that gets dumped onto Black people is actually a trait of the folks that invented the stereotype.

We were:

1. Called lazy by people that made us work for free
2. Called thieves by people that stole this land from the Indians
3. Called sexual degenerates by our rapists

It’s all a game, and it’s been played already to perfection by Susan Smith, Charles Stuart and Bonnie Sweeten just to name a very small few.

The only question becomes; are the people that falsely accuse Blacks of crimes racist themselves?

Well, my answer would be this: you don’t have to use crack to sell it.

In fact, often times, the best salesmen are those that wouldn’t touch the stuff.

So no, the lying accusers are not necessarily racists, they just know what sells.

Think about that the next time that celebrated oxycontin junkie Rush Limbaugh says something so offensive that it makes you wanna hurl.

Cause if you think that after all the money he’s made and all the attention he’s garnered lately that ol’ Rush isn’t absolutely in love with Barack Obama, you’ve still haven’t learned the game.

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When I was in high school, there was this Italian kid that I used to tease all the time because he had just that year in, like, 9^th grade discovered that Egypt was in Africa.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” I’d say with a leer.

“Don’t say it, Byers,” he’d warn.

I’d just laugh. The sad thing was, I didn’t know at the time about Hannibal the Carthaginian general and his spectacular victories in Spain and Italy or else I’d have really given that kid the business.

Hell, the only reason I knew that Egypt was in Africa was because I’d come across it in the encyclopedia.

They damn sure didn’t teach me that in school.

Interestingly enough, when I found myself enjoying Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought To Be way more than I ever figured I would, the one point of contention that immediately stuck in my craw was the fact that Rush went out of his way to say that Egyptians weren’t Black.

I wondered why, if true, was writing that even necessary? Was his next sentence going to be about how corpses weren’t alive?

Sure, nobody wants to think that any advanced civilizations came out of Africa.

But deeper than that, I actually think that one of the main reasons that a Eurocentric view of history is so stringently enforced upon all of us especially Black people is to mitigate the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by suggesting every so subtly, that hey, if it wasn’t for us, you people wouldn’t even know there was a rest of the world!

This, despite the fact that ancient western and southern African artifacts have been discovered all over the globe.

In fact, as almost everybody knows by now, Europeans were dead last into the so-called “New World” and then had the nerve to turn around and claim they discovered it.

That’s like finishing dead last in the 100 sprints and then demanding (and getting!) the gold medal!

So should Black people even care about the turmoil going on right now in Egypt because their President Hosni Mubarak is refusing to step down after nearly 30 years of what’s increasingly looking like autocratic rule?

Of course we should.

Those are our people.

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Every idiot likes to speculate on what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. would be thinking or doing if he were alive today so I figured, why should I be any different?

So here’s what I think: Dr. King would be married to a white woman and living in Africa if he were alive to day.

This probably leaves you with two questions immediately: why a white woman and why Africa?

Well, you may not know this, but Dr. King actually contemplated marrying the white girl that he was seeing back while he finished up his doctorate at Boston University.

He was as engaged in the concept of Civil Rights as he was when he eventually became famous, but weighing the pros versus the cons of presenting the world with a dynamic mixed-race couple at the forefront of Civil Rights and becoming and iconic black family man, he ultimately and maybe even wisely chose to marry Coretta Scott.

Also of note is the fact that the overwhelming bulk if not every last one of the women that Dr. King was alleged to have had affairs with were white.

The guy just had a taste for white chicks.

Sorry.

Plus when you consider that a lot of Black, militant and angry OGs—Frederick Douglass, Ishmael Reed and Quincy Jones immediately come to mind—either finally marry white or consistently marry white, it wouldn’t have surprised too many people if, after Coretta passed in 2006, the Dr. pulled a “Hef” and got a young, hot one.

Now, why Africa?

Dr. King was so bitter and disillusioned with America near the end of his life that he was probably only a day or two away from flag burning.

Everybody remembers him questioning near the end whether or not it was indeed wise to “integrate into a burning house”, but almost nobody picks up on one of the most amazing things he ever said in the last public speech he ever made on the last night of his life.

Think about it: “we as a people shall get to the promised land.”

He wasn’t talking about Cleveland, my Damies (shout out to Pootie Tang)!

All the great Black minds from Marcus Garvey to Bob Marley argued in favor of repatriation to Africa with two men in particular, men that King definitely respected and one that he actually ran with, having done so; W.E.B. Du Bois, and King’s ace boon… you know, Stokely Carmichael.

Doc would be an 82 year-old naturalized citizen of Ghana right now somewhere with an ex-playmate on his arm, watching sports, mad that the Falcons lost, but rooting for Lovie Smith and Mike Tomlin to make it to the Super Bowl.

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When Dick Gregory once decried “America’s habit of freaking out over bold acts of outrageous lawlessness,” he didn’t have to add as long as its white people that are committing those acts.

He didn’t have to.

We know Mr. Gregory. His omissions speak as loud as his words.

And look at us now.

We have freaked out.

And, just like we always do when a white person does something absolutely shocking, violent, and criminally absurd, we wanna get to the bottom of it.

We wanna know the motivations for it.

We wanna get inside the head of the man or woman that committed the atrocity.

We wanna figure out what made them go off the deep end.

What made them lose it.

What makes them tick.

Like the great BumpCity says, it’s sufficient to label a Black person “an animal” whenever one of us commits and unsavory crime, but when a white person bugs out, there are certain “factors” that need to be considered.

There’s some testing that we should do

Some numbers probably need crunching somewhere.

We’ve gotta run a study.

Jared Lee Loughner is just the man too much of America has been waiting for. Make no mistake, his is the method intended to be used by all those jobless, fatso Tea Partiers that are always crying that they need to “Take Back Our Country!”

What’s sad is that they don’t realize they still have it!

One Black President has not a Black planet or even a Black country made.

But what bothers me is that Loughner’s is not an isolated incident.

My links haven’t been working lately folks, so I’m gonna paste a url that I want the scholarly amongst ya’ll to copy and paste into your browser.

http://www.csgv.org/issues-and-campaigns/guns-democracy-and-freedom/insurrection-timeline

That’s a list of all the anti-government sentiment and violence that’s taken place since Barack Obama became a serious Presidential contender.

There’s over 100 of them.

During the 60’s, the extreme Left saw themselves as revolutionaries with Blacks, often as Black Panthers and members of other militant groups, frequently serving as bloody sacrificial lambs to government groups that saw us as direct representatives of anti-establishment.

Now, with the extreme Right seeing themselves as revolutionaries, the question becomes will Blacks again become bloody sacrificial lambs, though this time to fools that, because the President is a Black man, see us as direct representatives of the government?

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In one of her three great books—I can’t remember which because I read her complete works back-to-back-to-back—Gayl Jones has a mock dialogue which I’ll paraphrase like so:

White Person: Why aren’t there more great Black scientists?

Black Person: All our best minds are tackling the “race problem”.

I was reminded of this again yesterday after reading an online newspaper article that had nothing to do with race.

As usual, I panned down to the comments and saw that someone named Madeline1 must have written something along the lines of “all Black people are on welfare” because several of the next posts, presumably all from Black people, were dedicated to refuting this claim.

While reading eloquently written personal histories that included how individuals were raised, which fine universities they attended and where they currently earned top dollar as valued employees, I couldn’t wondering why any of these amazing folks even bothered.

They weren’t going to change Madeline1’s opinion. She had written what she believed.

The fact that she is dumb enough to believe this—despite, I’m sure, going outside, getting on a bus driven by a Black bus driver, buying coffee from a Black barista at a coffee house and going to her own job where she sits maybe one cubicle away from a Black fellow employee—is the burden of her own stupidity.

Racists aren’t only idiots, they’re also hypocrites.

We hear racists claim to hate Black people because we’re “like animals” from the same people that hate Michael Vick because he killed dogs.

Yet, unlike, say, some fool barking at the moon, whom we all seem to know well enough to avoid, whenever most of us encounter a racist, we’re consumed with the overwhelming desire to change his or her mind.

This wastes time.

Still, while I would love to be able to suggest that it would be better to just say “Yeah! Sure!” and agree to any absurd racist thing you heard or overheard just in the interest of brevity, if we were crazy enough to keep agreeing with racists, eventually the call would sound for us all to be rounded up and killed.

And we couldn’t agree with that.

So still, despite the fact that it takes our time and it wastes our time we must remain forever vigilant at the sound of ideas that could potentially be harmful to us.

And that sucks.

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Of my three main New Year’s resolutions:

1. Stop getting angry as quickly, violently and easily,

2. Stop referring to other people and even thinking of them as “idiots”,

3. Say the word “relax” over and over to calm myself down

The only one that wasn’t broken literally seconds after the clock struck 12 was the third one.

I’m far from perfect and I expect people to literally see my insanity reeking from my pores when they look at me.

I talk to myself out loud and laugh like a maniac at jokes that only I would understand because they’re playing themselves out on the widescreen inside my own head.

Yet, of course, I’m Black, educated, fit, working, beautiful and all the other things that all the ladies love.

But am I… wrong?

Since I was the nut that declared 2011 “The Year of the Black Woman”, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least try to sum up the current state of the Black man.

Judging by myself as an example, we’re f*cked.

The ones of us that are ½ witty think we’re brilliant, the ones of us that are ½ cute think we’re Adonis’s, the ones of us that earn ½ decent salaries think were “Black” Bill Gates and Donald Trumps and we all think we’re sex gods.

And these are just the brothers you see on the street that aren’t in jail and actually like women and Black women at that.

The other brothers don’t exactly count because, believe it or not, we represent an elevated plane to their current state of depravity.

In other words, the junkies, conmen, crooks and liars have to work their way up to our level.

The problem, since I am gonna have to finally admit that there is a problem, is that very few of us have an internal ideal that’s entirely independent of any preexisting archetypes.

You’ll catch that whenever you hear a Black man use either one of two phrases: “I’m like…” or “If that was me…”

You hear these all the time.

“I’m like Jay-Z”

Or

“LeBron shouldn’t have gone to Miami. If that was me…”

Both of these phrases are symbolic of our need to distance ourselves from ourselves in order to gain perspective when probably the ability to use external guideposts in order to gain internal focus would be preferable.

Or maybe this is a phenomenon that occurs in all men but I notice it in us the most.

Now, this was a great post, wasn’t it?

Humility should have been my 4^th New Year’s resolution.

So now, despite the fact that I’ve done ya’ll a fantastic service by writing this, I’d like to thank everyone that took the time to read it.

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When I think about the beating that Black women took in 2010 and now prepare to forecast a glorious 2011 for ya’ll, I reminded how Winston Churchill said at the time when his England seemed almost certainly doomed to go down in defeat to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, “If the British Empire and it’s Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Well, in a year that worked it’s best to convince us that all Black women were poor, fat, dumb and disease ridden, the most impressive thing that ya’ll did collectively was avoid implosion.

You seemed to realize that all you were facing was, in reality, psychological warfare.

You seemed to understand that if you believed what was being written about you, you were lost.

Yet, ya’ll are still here, for better or worse, beaten but unbowed, bent but not broken.

Good show, ladies.

It may not always seem like Black men have your back (because probably, sometimes, we don’t), but trust that the best amongst us realize that without you guys, we’re all finished.

And let me just make this one thing clear: I’m no suck-up. I hate most of ya’ll. It’s just that ya’ll are considerably better than any possible alternative.

So now I’m going to make 3 suggestions for Black women that, since they’ll be coming for a Black man without a 20lb mustache or an 8-button suit, I’ll expect ya’ll to disregard entirely.

1.      Make Peace Internally—Lil Kim vs. Nicki Minaj is simply among the more famous cases of Black women beefing. Ya’ll need to form a union or something. Anything else is counterproductive, counterrevolutionary and holds us all back.

2.      Treat Your Kids Better than You Treat Your Hair—I know for a lot of ya’ll that sounds impossible, but trust me, when you guys out and your hair looks great but your kids look busted, the only things that people will remember are the kids.

3.      Build the Man You Want— Any woman that doesn’t realize her own personal power over men is a disgrace to her gender. You guys could end sagging pants in a weekend by just walking up to all the swaggering youth and saying “that looks gay!”

And there you have it.

I’ve given you guys pearls!

But don’t bother thanking me or even searching to find me.

I’m about to holla at Amber Rose.

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Yes, I know that it’s a stretch to consider this behavior “sanctioned”, but since it hardly goes punished, it’d be tough to argue that it’s frowned upon.

First, of course, we got Ben Roethlisberger, two time NFL Champion quarterback of your Pittsburgh Steelers who’s also been twice accuse of forcible rape—the most traumatizing of which I’m guessing was the poor hotel employee who Ben allegedly tossed down, raped, then threw out of his room with the parting words “If anyone asks you, you fixed my television. Now go!”

Next, of course, we’ve got Brett Favre, himself a Super Bowl champion, now known more famously for stunting the career growth of the two Black quarterbacks that sit on the bench while he ruins the Minnesota Vikings by insisting on continuing to play poorly, and of course, known most famously (now) four texting out pictures of his “Kanye West” to unsuspecting Jenn Sterger, then an employee of the New York Jets.

At the time, the very married Mr. Favre was playing for the Jets, making this incident no less than a case of spectacular sexual harassment.

Last and closest to home for me, a Jet fan, is our own head coach, Rex Ryan, a man who up until this week had never met a headline that he didn’t want his name in, has now been found to be a participant in some sort of degenerate foot fetish video starting his wife that also has undertones of swinging, wife swapping, and general overall creepiness.

In Mr. Ryan’s case, the perversion, though embarrassing, is only personal.

In the cases of Mr. Roethlisberger and Mr. Favre, it’s potential criminal.

Still, if you watch as much of ESPN’s Sports Center as I do (while doing what at my place, passes for “exercise”) you’ve no doubt noticed that with the exception of the Roethlisberger incident, during which the tone was one of almost pity for Mr. Roethlisberger because he had indeed been suspended for the first four games of the season, the tone of the coverage of the Favre and Ryan incidents has been almost jovial.

I watched my own fellow alum Stan Verrett make several foot gags this very morning in reference to the Ryan incident.

Meanwhile, if you want to see a conversation about a NFL personality turn serious even hostile, you’d have to wait until the talk turned to the exploits of one Michael Vick.

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I’m always offended when some 21^st Century jerk-off, made soft from fast food and text messaging, starts in with a line like, “I couldn’t have been no slave.”

I have to resist the urge to correct what he’s saying (grammar included) because I know what he means is, “I couldn’t have continued to be a slave.”

Taken literally, it would almost be as if he’s suggesting that were he born 175 years ago to a slave mother in the antebellum south, he still would have found a way to emerge from the womb shouting “fight the power!” and “kill whitey!”

What I think is interesting to note here is that the word “slave” in it’s current etymology has it’s root in that period in history when Moors and Muslims conquered Spain and other parts of southern Europe.

It is a derivative of the word “slav” for Slavic people, who were the Central Europeans that had been forced into servitude by the Moors.

How’s that for a bitter irony? A word that came into existence to describe whites forced into the servitude by Blacks now only conjures to mind the image of Blacks forced into servitude by whites.

Personally, I’d always liked to imagine that, after being born into slavery, there’d have been a point in my life where I looked at my massa and realized that he was a man no different that I, and that I would have refused from that day forward to be his “slave”.

This is what I’d like to imagine.

I don’t pretend that this certainly would have been the case.

I also don’t judge my ancestors—I’m thankful for them.

And who knows what attachments, fears, phobias or perks kept them right there on the plantation.

As for you, be honest.

After being born a slave, would you have continued to be one?

Chances are, if you’re an adult and you’ve never left the country, let alone your home state, if you’ve never worked for yourself or at least tried to start your own business, if you’ve been in jail but didn’t try to escape, and if you’re unable to discipline yourself without the threat of external reprimand, then I’ve got news for you…

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Whenever we propose that one Black can make us all look bad, one of the most subliminally interesting things that we’re suggesting about white people is that they’re so dumb that they can’t tell us apart.

If I were white, I’d be insulted by this—if I were smart enough to get that I should be insulted.

It doesn’t help the White Cause that a lot of times, they lump us all in together with the latest fool in Black skin.

We never do this, however.

Take the latest white nut (and isn’t there always a new one?): that fool down in Florida, Clay Duke, that drew the V for Vendetta symbol before opening fire at a school board meeting and eventually killing himself.

We’d have to be Nubian Islamic Hebrew-crazy to suggest that he’s a fair representative of all white people.

But we go into a panic whenever a Black person does something even remotely ridiculous because we fear how we’ll be judged because of it?

The guardians of the “positive Black image” have things backwards.

We weren’t enslaved and Jim Crow-ed and beaten, raped and murdered because we have a negative image.

We have a negative image because we were enslaved and Jim Crow-ed and beaten, raped and murdered.

By American logic, if we were a stronger people, we wouldn’t have allowed all that to happen.

If history has shown us anything, it’s that from Hitler to Manson to Limbaugh, white people have had have the majority of the most deranged lunatics ever.

Yet white people are able to point at them too and say, “Look! Look at those crazy nuts!” as if in their case, sharing the same skin color as a madman is as completely incidental as if they were wearing the same colored socks.

I mean c’mon: Pontius Pilate, a Roman, washed his hands of the death of Jesus for Christsakes (pun intended) and I’m supposed to believe that some random crackhead or pick-pocket or drive-by shooter makes me look bad?

Please.

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