I'm glad I did watch last Sunday, though, because they featured a young brother from Harvard Law named Bryonn Bain who had produced a Black Man's Bill of Rights for the Village Voice.

The gist of young Bryonn's story is that he and his brother and cousin had to spend a night in jail in New York City based on little more than the fact that they were Black -- and thus fit the "profile" which Mayor Guiliani and every police official in New York will tell you, your Momma and anybody else who will listen simply does not exist.

Well, Bryonn, being a law student, can testify --- and does in the Village Voice --- that it sure as hell does exist. So can a lot of other Black people, mostly black men. I would recommend that all of ya'll read Bryonn's "Bill of Rights," though I suspect there is a lot of ya'll who simply won't like it. It will make you uncomfortable, as it should, and probably send you into some major denial, as it shouldn't but I suspect it will having lived around White folks in denial most of my life.

WE all know that ya'll need to believe that everything is just hunky-dorey. You prove it to us all the time. Seems like that's a lot easier for ya'll than facing some basic facts about this country or trying to figure out why 95% of Black voters DID NOT choose George W. Bush.

If I understand the White Folks Version of History correctly, ya'll want to maintain that

1. Black folks are basically lazy, bitter and buyin' into victimhood.
   
   
2. The playing field has already been made level by laws on the books. We should accept that and not point to "isolated incidents" of employment, housing and other economic discrimination.
   
   
3. We, most especially, shouldn't blame ya'll because we are expected to perform economic uplift without a viable economic infrastructure.
   
   
4. Those lynchings which ran rampant in the early part of the last century were an historical aberration,
   
   
5. the "white flight" from the cities had nothing to do with racism but everything to do with the fact that we are all criminals and drug addicts who drive down property values by the fact of very existence, and
   
   
6. that we should stop complaining about racism and start pullin' ourselves up by our bootstraps.

"Amendment V: Any nigger accused of a crime is to be punished without any due process whatsoever." --- Bryonn Bain

Radio Raheem

They the same folks who need to insist we live in a "color-blind" society. Yeah, maybe they right. If you have any color at all, other than Lily White, you show up on stage, but NOT down among the delegates at their conventions or up among the Ole Boys divvying up the pork barrel pie.

See, this is why I don't like watchin' that damned "60 Minutes." It hits on stuff that gets my "black rage" goin', as the people lounging on the banks of denial like to call it. It remind me about the stuff I need to be not only depressed but ANGRY about all over again --- as if I don't already have that stuff shoved down my throat every single day of my daily life!

I think about some of them folks I met at that trade show out in Ohio my company sent me to last month. I think about a lot of stuff. And I know that I don't like most of it and wonder how the Hell I can change it.

I understand from "60 Minutes" that young Bryonn is committed to changing this stuff by meeting with other young folks like himself who are concerned about the continuing racism they encounter and want to find reasonable and effective ways they can combat it.

Sometimes I like to think that by contributing my two cents here I am also acting as an agent for change. But I also wonder if it's enough. Maybe, considering the readership of the G21, I'm just preachin' to the choir...

What I'd really like to do is sit down in a room one day with your Ward Connerly or your Trent Lott and talk to them about this stuff. Not in front of no TV cameras, where they could just do their stock lines for the media, but in an isolated room somewhere, mano a mano. We would have this rule that there would be no bullshit, party-line garbage allowed, but that we had to speak from our own experience and be willing to be called on our bullshit. We would have to respond from our hearts about what the other folks had to say. Think of it! Me and Bryonn Bain in the same room with Trent Lott and Ward Connerly.

And the last rule would be, once you came outttah the room, you had to admit if the other side of the argument had any effect on your thinking.

I don't expect anything like that will ever happen, Homes. But it should.

Of course, Trent Lott and Ward Connerly have a lot more to lose than me and Bryonn by looking for some truth... and a helluva lot more by looking for some change.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? Go ahead and email Raheem.

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