The Miami Herald, by Leonard Pitts Jr.

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Ronald Smith lost an index finger and part of one thumb. Emily Lyons lost an eye. Fallon Stubbs lost her mother.

The losses came not because of anything they did, nor anything they said. It was just happenstance. Just the result of being in the wrong place when bombs exploded.

It has been a few years and chances are you've forgotten their names, if you ever knew them at all. I came across them while doing a computer search to see how many times the name of accused serial bomber Eric Rudolph and the word "sympathy" have appeared together in news media since his arrest last Saturday in North Carolina.

I got 49 hits.

Some led to people like Bill Hughes, mayor of Murphy, N.C., who says media have oversold the notion that folks in that area identify with Rudolph because his reputed views (white supremacist, anti-gay rights, anti-government, antiabortion) mirror their own.

It's a fair admonition. The rural South is too often stereotyped as a monolithic backwater of ignorance and intolerance. I refuse to believe that most people who live south of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon's line would find anything admirable in Rudolph.

But many clearly do. They're careful to disavow the violence he's alleged to have visited upon his targets: the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a gay nightclub and abortion clinic in the same town, another clinic in Birmingham. At the same time, they make clear that if Rudolph did it, they can surely understand why.

Franklin Holloway, a retiree, told The Washington Post, "I wish they hadn't caught him. Look at those abortion doctors. They kill innocent babies."

His wife Linda added, "If he did that Olympic bombing he should be punished. But as far as those abortion clinics and the gay club is concerned, he shouldn't be punished for that. You see, those things are not right in the sight of God."

One wonders if she recognizes Osama bin Laden's reasoning coming out of her mouth. One doubts it. Religious fanatics are seldom perceptive of irony.

Still, it's fitting that she invokes al Qaeda arguments to justify the bombings. After all, the crimes amount to nothing less than terrorism.

Rudolph is believed to have spent five years hiding in the rugged woods on the southwestern tip of the Tar Heel State. Authorities believe he had help, though no one has confessed. Still, many locals say they'd have been willing to give Rudolph any assistance he needed. Some still are.

One woman, Betty Howard, has a "Pray For Eric Rudolph" sign on the marquee outside her diner. She told The New York Times she's starting a legal defense fund. "Bless his heart," she says. "Eric needs our help."

In one sense, there's nothing new here. From Jesse James and Billy The Kid to John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, people have periodically elevated to the status of folk hero thieves, thugs and killers who supposedly "stood" for something. That doesn't make it any less offensive.

And as for Rudolph's alleged causes: White supremacy and homophobia are indefensible and anti-government paranoia -- the so-called "patriot movement" -- is just flat stupid. His opposition to abortion is the one issue that carries any moral heft, the one about which decent people can, and probably always will, disagree.

Which is why antiabortion activists ought to be the least forgiving of all. If authorities are right, Rudolph has soiled their moral authority with his hypocrisy. I don't care where you stand on the issue: It's impossible to see reverence for life in the act of planting bombs. Much less a cause for sympathy.

Meantime, Fallon Stubbs grieves her mother, Emily Lyons still has nails embedded in her body and Ronald Smith is hoping a recent surgery will allow him to finally walk without a brace.

I'll reserve my sympathies for them.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

This is the fetid truth behind the flowery words, the stinking fact much of the nation would prefer not to know.

If you ever saw that picture of Emmett Till, you never forgot it.

Not the one that shows a handsome brown teenager, hat tipped up slightly off his forehead. Not, in other words, the "before" picture.

No, I'm talking about the picture that was taken after. After he went from Chicago to visit family in Mississippi in the late summer of 1955. After he accepted a schoolboy dare to flirt with a white woman working behind the counter of the general store. After he called her "baby" and allegedly gave a wolf whistle. After her husband and his half-brother came for him in the dead of night. After his body was fished from the Tallahatchie River.

The picture of him that was taken then, published in Jet magazine and flashed around the world, was stomach-turning. A lively and prankish boy had become a bloated grotesquerie -- an ear missing, an eye gouged out, a bullet hole in his head. You looked at that picture and you felt that here was the reason coffins have lids.

But his mother refused onlookers that mercy, refused to give him a closed-casket funeral. She delayed the burial for four days, keeping her son's mutilated body on display as thousands came to pay their respects. "I wanted the world to see what I had seen," she later explained. "I wanted the world to see what had happened in Mississippi. I wanted the world to see what had happened in America."

The world saw and was electrified.

Mamie Till Mobley died in Chicago on Monday of an apparent heart attack. And if one were seeking to sum up her life, it might be enough to say that she spent 47 years keeping the casket open, speaking, writing and agitating in the name of her murdered son. Indeed, her book,  The Death of Innocence, is due for release this year.

I met her once, maybe 30 years after her son's death, by which point she must have told his story a million times. And she still welled up as she spoke, her voice stammering and turning gray.

At the time, I was writing and producing a radio documentary tracing over 500 years of African and African-American history. I'll never forget my narrator's response when he reviewed a script that recounted Emmett's ordeal and the ordeals of other black men and women who were hanged, burned or hacked to pieces for the crime of being. He jokingly dubbed me "the Stephen King of black history" for my insistence on including the grisly details.

But I happen to believe Mamie Till Mobley was right to keep the casket open.

We're always so eager to hide the horror. Close the casket, turn your eyes, use euphemism to obscure truths too obscene.

Consider Trent Lott's first attempt at apology, when he blithely described segregation as "the discarded policies of the past." If you didn't know any better, you might have thought he was talking about farm subsidies or tax codes, so bloodless and opaque was the language.

But segregation wasn't opaque and it surely wasn't bloodless. It was a Mississippi courtroom where the sheriff sauntered in every day and greeted spectators in the colored section with a cheery, "Hello, niggers." It was two white men freely admitting that they had kidnapped a black Chicago boy. It was witnesses who placed the men at a barn inside which they heard a child being tortured.

And it was a jury of white men who heard this evidence, then deliberated for less than an hour before returning an acquittal. As one of them told a reporter, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have took that long."

This is the fetid truth behind the flowery words, the stinking fact much of the nation would prefer not to know.

But by her very presence, a murdered boy's mother demanded that we be better than that, demanded that we be, at least and at last, brave enough to face the horrors we have made and that have, in turn, made us.

Mamie Till Mobley was 81 years old at the time of her death. Her only child was 14 at the time of his.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Forgive me, but I'm about to speak heresy.

Blame the outgoing governor of Illinois, who last week emptied his state's Death Row. George Ryan commuted to life in prison the death sentences of 167 condemned criminals.

The result: a firestorm of criticism, much of it from those who have lost loved ones to violent crime. Our instinct is to give great weight to what those people have to say. To listen with great reverence.

But -- and here's the heresy -- it occurs to me that maybe we've already listened with too much reverence.

I bow to no one in my empathy for people whose lives have been affected by violent crime. You see, I live with one. My wife's brother Ted was killed in a random shooting 10 years ago.

I still remember her saying, ''What? What?'' over and over again into the receiver when we got that awful 3 a.m. phone call. It was as if words had suddenly ceased to have meaning.

I have stood with her at his grave. I have awakened in middle night to find her wide awake. I have held her helplessly as she wept.

So I know a little something about this. And one of the things I know is that there's nothing I would not have done to spare her that pain. Or to get justice for her.

That's the problem. Because we all feel that way, don't we? We all empathize, we all suffer with them, we all feel there's nothing we would not or should not do for people whose grief is so immense. And if they want, if they need, to see a killer killed, so be it.

In the face of their demands on our collective conscience, it can seem insensitive or even uncaring to voice doubt about that process. Yet, if you are intellectually honest about it, how can you not?

The answer is simple: Avoid intellectual honesty at all costs.

Consider the recent study indicating that the state of Maryland has been choosing whom to execute based on color of skin and place of residence.

You'd think that would give a fair man pause. Yet incoming Gov. Robert Ehrlich has shrugged it off, keeping an ill-advised campaign promise to lift a death penalty moratorium imposed by his predecessor.

The difference between George Ryan and the Robert Ehrlichs of the world is this: Somehow, Ryan reached a point where conscience would no longer allow him to ignore what he saw.

Three years ago, Ryan, a former death penalty supporter, suspended state executions. He was stung by the fact that since 1977, 13 people had been freed from the Illinois death house after they were found to have been wrongly convicted.

Now the other shoe drops. ''I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,'' Ryan said last week.

Surely that makes sense. If you owned a machine -- a car, a computer, a microwave oven -- that was as prone to failure as capital punishment, you would have ditched it a long time ago. Yet we insist that this broken hunk of junk can somehow be made to function properly if we are just persistent and ingenious enough. And never mind all the people who are freed from Death Row because a cop lied, a witness erred, a lawyer bungled, the system failed.

Killing killers illustrates our respect for the sanctity of life, death penalty advocates argue with oily, Orwellian rhetoric. And you look at this poor slob who just spent 20 years under sentence of death for something he didn't do and you wonder, what about his life? Doesn't it have sanctity, too?

By any logical standard, life without parole should be the highest punishment in our legal arsenal. It's less expensive than the death penalty and it is reversible in the event of error.

So where's the logic in state-sanctioned executions? There isn't any. There's only the blinding emotion that says if we don't kill killers, we betray the victims. We show ourselves to be soft.

And how silly is that? By sentencing 167 people to the slow death of the five-by-12 cell, George Ryan did not save killers from justice.

But he just may have saved us from ourselves.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Unfortunately, we remain a society riven by "isms,'' racial and sexual. We are also a society in which some people use isms as an all-purpose excuse for failure. Not just failure to succeed, but also failure to try.

Race matters.

Boil it down, and that's what Monday's milestone Supreme Court rulings in the University of Michigan case reduce to, an acknowledgment of the obvious.

Not that the rulings were one-sided. As you surely know by now, justices struck down a formula that awarded a certain number of points toward undergraduate admission to applicants based upon race.

But at the same time, and to the relief of affirmative action advocates, the court affirmed that race can be taken into account in college admissions. There is, a majority of justices reasoned, a social benefit to be derived in fostering diversity in higher education, a benefit important enough to justify overriding the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

Predictably, Clarence Thomas was among the justices who disagreed. In a dissenting opinion, Thomas, an ardent opponent of affirmative action and the only African American on the court, repeated the oft-stated argument that racial preferences taint the achievements of racial minorities.

"When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry or academia," he wrote, "it is an open question today whether their skin color played a part in their advancement."

MYOPIC VIEWPOINT

It's a myopic argument. The reasoning proceeds, after all, from the implicit assumption that skin color has played no role in the advancement of white males, that their predominance in "government, industry and academia" stems solely from their hard work, talent and skill. One has to be naive, if not downright ignorant, to believe that, to think that laws and customs designed to exclude blacks, Hispanics and women from the field of competition did not also play some small part in that success.

White males have benefited from a de facto affirmative action for the entire 227 years of the American experiment. And for many of us, the issue of whether their race or gender played a part in their advancement is not an "open question," but a settled certainty.

It is important to remember that, for all the talk of affirmative action as a tool of diversity, its original mission was to redress years of systemic racism and sexism, enabling blacks, Hispanics and women to enter arenas that had historically been closed to them.

EXPIRATION DATE

Had we been wiser at the point of conception, this might not be such a contentious issue now. Affirmative action would have, should have, come with a built-in expiration date - say a generation or two, during which we would have worked to change the circumstances that made it necessary in the first place.

Unfortunately, we remain a society riven by "isms,'' racial and sexual. We are also a society in which some people use isms as an all-purpose excuse for failure. Not just failure to succeed, but also failure to try.

Take, for example, the low collective test scores of black students. You can argue that this academic incompetence is the byproduct of the negative, anti-intellectual self-image those kids are fed from birth and I wouldn't disagree.

But at the same time, we probably shouldn't be surprised to discover that the people who, statistically speaking, watch the most television, do the worst in school.

You don't need the Supreme Court to fix that. But you do need to take ownership of the problem. Preferably sooner, rather than later.

Because this will not, cannot, ought not, go on forever. Indeed, in writing in support of affirmative action, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor speculated upon a day, 25 years from now, when it might necessarily end.

That ought not be seen as an obstacle, but a challenge, a spur to finally confront all the hindrances to minority achievement. Affirmative action is not an end unto itself, only an imperfect means. Its goal should be its own obsolescence.

Meaning not a nation where affirmative action no longer exists, but one where it no longer needs to.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Hi, God, it's me, Pat Robertson. How's everything in Heaven?

Clear skies, warm sun and a gentle breeze, eh? Well, it's been raining cats and dogs here in Virginia. But I guess You already knew that, didn't You?

Listen, God, the reason I'm calling: I'm sure You saw in the paper where I've asked the viewers of my TV show, The 700 Club, to join me in a ''prayer offensive.'' You've probably heard from them already; they're more responsive than Pavlov's dogs.

Little joke there, Lord.

Anyway, what we want is, we want You to change the Supreme Court. Frankly, your people have had it up to their keisters -- excuse the rough language, God -- with the Court. First, they said schoolchildren couldn't be forced to pray to You. Then they said a woman had the right to ''choose'' whether she wanted to be a mother. Now, the court has struck down an anti-sodomy law in the state of Texas. Left-wingers are calling it a great victory for so-called ``gay rights.''

But Lord, all us real Americans are terribly concerned. I don't mind telling You, I trembled as I thought about what this awful ruling will lead to. Homosexuals will be allowed to get married. Prostitution will be legalized, and bestiality will be mandatory. Even incest will be tolerated -- and I'm not just talking about in your trailer parks either.

Then I realized that the solution is simple: Why don't You just get rid of three of the liberal justices? That way, our president can replace them with good, You-fearing conservatives? As I told my viewers, it shouldn't be too hard, given that one liberal justice is 83 years old, another has cancer and another has a heart condition.

Now, I know what you're thinking, Lord, and no, I'm not exactly asking You to kill them. That's the same thing that darn liberal media has been saying. They've been having a field day at my expense ever since this all began. That twit Paula Zahn treated me like a moron on CNN. Some guy from United Press pretty much called me an idiot.

But God, You and I know You wouldn't have to kill them to get them off the court. All You need to do is nudge them a little. Let's say maybe one of them has a recurrence of cancer, not even cancer in a vital part. Cancer of the fingernail, maybe. Or another has a little heart scare. The old ticker just misses a beat or two. Or maybe one falls and breaks a hip. I'm not asking for a compound fracture, Lord. Just a little break. Just enough to convince him to hang up the robe.

Is that really so unreasonable? I don't think so. Not if it allows our president to stack the court with conservatives.

Frankly, Lord -- and I'm not being critical -- I don't know why You never thought of this before. I mean, everybody knows you're a Republican. After all, aren't conservatives made in Your image? Says so right there in the Bible.

So I can't figure out why You've put up with liberal shenanigans for so long. It's been going on for decades now. Sensitivity training, political correctness, diversity. And don't even get me started talking about rights. Black rights, women's rights, Latino rights, homosexual rights. Everybody wants rights.

What I want is to get back to the good old days when we didn't have to worry so much about rights. The days when Beaver Cleaver was still on the air and Doris Day was still on the radio. The days when, if the president said you were going to war, darn it, you didn't stand around debating the matter, you went to war.

If pushing three Supreme Court justices out the door is what it takes to get back to those days, I don't think it's too high a price.

And while you're at it, could You also do something about that liberal media? I'm serious, Lord, they're a gosh-awful pain in my neck.

Again, I'm not looking for anything fatal or excessively bloody. Maybe just a plague of frogs in the newsroom of The New York Times. Or locusts could fly out of Dan Rather's backside. Something simple.

Anyway, I leave it to your judgment. Thanks for listening. And tell Jesus I said hey.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

So what is it you have against gay marriage?

I'm not talking to the guy next to you. He doesn't have a problem with it. No, I'm talking to you, who is fervently opposed.

The number of folks who agree with you is up sharply since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-sodomy laws in Texas. As recently as May, 49 percent of us supported some form of gay marriage, according to The Gallup Organization. The figure has since dropped to just 40 percent. That's a precipitous decline.

So what's the problem? What is it that bothers you about gay people getting married?

Don't read me that part in Leviticus where homosexuality is condemned. I mean, that same book of the Gospel mandates the death penalty for sassy kids and fortune tellers, by which standard the Osbourne children and Miss Cleo should have been iced a long time ago.

I read The Book. I believe The Book. But I also know that it's impossible to take literally every passage in The Book, unless you want to wind up in prison or a mental ward.

So don't hide behind the Bible. Let's just be honest here, you and me. Why do you oppose gay marriage, really?

It just feels wrong to you, doesn't it? At some visceral level, it just seems to offend something fundamental.

Hey, I understand. It's one of the emotional sticking points for us heterosexual types, this primeval ''ick'' factor where homosexuality is concerned. I won't try to talk you out of it.

I will, though, point out that once upon a time, the same gut-level sense of wrong -- and for that matter, the same Bible -- was used to keep Jews from swimming in the community pool, women from voting and black people from riding at the front of the bus. All those things once felt as profoundly offensive to some people as gay marriage does to you right now.

The issue has been vaulted to the forefront in the last few days. Political conservatives have been galvanized by it. President Bush says he wants to ''codify'' marriage as a heterosexual union. And the Vatican has told Catholic legislators that they must oppose laws giving legal standing to gay unions, unions the church describes as ``gravely immoral.''

Which is funny, given the level of sexual morality the church has demonstrated lately.

Anyway, the reasoning seems to be that gay people will damage or cheapen the sanctity of marriage and that this can't be allowed because marriage is the foundation of our society.

I agree that marriage -- and I mean legal, not common law -- is an institution of vital importance. It stabilizes communities, socializes children, helps create wealth. It is, indeed, our civilization's bedrock.

But you know something? That bedrock has been crumbling for years, without homosexual help. We don't attach so much importance to marriage anymore, do we? These days, we marry less, we marry later, we divorce more. And cohabitation, whether as a prelude to, or a substitute for, marriage, has gone from novelty to norm.

We say we shack up because we don't need a piece of paper to tell us we are in love. I've always suspected it was actually because we fear the loss of freedom. Or because we're scared to bet forever.

I'm not trying to beat up cohabitors. A long time ago, I was one.

But it strikes me as intriguing, instructive and poignant that gay couples so determinedly seek what so many of us scorn, are so ready to take the risk many of us refuse, find such value in an institution we have essentially declared valueless. There's something oddly inspiring in their struggle to achieve the social sanction whose importance many of us long ago dismissed.

So tell me again why it is you don't want them to have that.

I mean, yeah, some people say they are a threat to the sanctity of marriage. But I'm thinking they might just be its salvation.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

This is how you stone a woman to death.

You bury her up to her neck. Then you heave stones at her head. One imagines her face slowly obliterated, her skull repeatedly broken. One imagines the process takes a long time.

One finds it hard to imagine a crueler way to die.

Last Thursday, a court in Nigeria spared Amina Lawal that grisly fate. She is a 31-year-old peasant who had been convicted of adultery undersharia law, a religious code based on the Koran. The chief evidence of her ''crime'': her 2-year-old daughter, Wasila.

Lawal has long claimed innocence, saying Wasila's father promised to marry her. But the man she identified turned out to be married already and denied fathering her child. Three male witnesses corroborated his claim that he never had sex with Lawal.

An outsider is at a loss to understand how a man's friends can authoritatively testify that he did not have intercourse. But their word was enough under sharia law, and the man was acquitted.

TECHNICALITIES

Lawal's exoneration was less sweeping. Judges relied largely on technicalities in setting her free. Their ruling also took into account interpretations of sharia law that hold that an embryo can gestate for up to five years as opposed to the more widely accepted nine months.

Something else an outsider finds hard to figure. Still, that fanciful time frame allows for the possibility that Lawal's ex-husband fathered the child, thus contributing to her acquittal.

I am not a scholar on the Koran, but I'm sure it contains passages to justify throwing rocks at Amina Lawal. Nor would I be surprised to hear that it also contravenes its own harsh justice by passages requiring mercy, compassion, forgiveness.

In this, it would be much like the Christian Bible, which also requires death by stoning for people who commit adultery. Yet, when a group of men brings to Christ an adulterous woman with a demand that the penalty be enacted, he just kneels and doodles in the dirt. When they press him, he stands and says, ''Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.'' Then he kneels and doodles some more.

SHAMED

One by one, the men slink away.

And isn't that always the way? People are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when it allows them to stand in judgment of someone else, licenses them to feel superior to someone else, tells them they are more righteous than someone else.

They are less enthusiastic when religiosity demands that they be compassionate to someone else. That they show charity, service and mercy to everyone else.

Consider that last month thousands of people wept on the steps of an Alabama courthouse in support of a rock bearing the Ten Commandments. And watching, you wondered: What hungry person gets fed because of this? What naked person is clothed, what homeless one housed?

It seemed a fresh reminder that religious people are often the poorest advertisement for religious life.

How much more convincing an advertisement, how much more compelling a testimony, if people of faith were more often caught by news cameras demonstrating against healthcare cuts that fill our streets with the homeless mentally ill. Or confronting the slumlord about the vermin-infested holes he offers as places for families to live. Or crusading to make the sweatshop owner pay a living wage to workers who are treated little better than slaves.

STRONG MEDICINE

Problem is, this would require more than the ability to feel self-righteous and aggrieved. It would require putting oneself on the line. Small wonder many people of faith prefer to content themselves with spiritual busywork.

Sometimes, piety is just an excuse to throw rocks at somebody's head.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I guess I touched a nerve.

That much seems apparent from the dozens of responses to my recent column about a hospital in Abington, Pa., where a white man asked that no black doctors or nurses be allowed to assist in the delivery of his child. The hospital agreed, a decision I lambasted.

Which has produced the aforementioned dozens of critical e-mails. The tone varies from spittle-spewing bigotry to sweet reason, but they all make the same point: that affirmative action entitles white people to question black people's competence.

As a reader who chose to remain nameless put it, many people wonder if a given black professional ``is there because of his/her skills and abilities, or because of affirmative action. Unfortunately, affirmative action policies leave many unanswered questions about a black person's education and training, as well as skills and abilities. . . . How do we answer these questions?''

I will try my best to answer them with a straight face. It's going to be difficult.

Because there's an elephant in this room, isn't there? It's huge and noisy and rather smelly, yet none of these good people sees it. The elephant is this simple fact:

White men are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action this country has ever seen.

That's not rhetoric or metaphor. It's only truth.

THE NATION'S CUSTOM

If affirmative action is defined as giving someone an extra boost based on race, it's hard to see how anyone can argue the point. Slots for academic admission, for employment and promotion, for bank loans and for public office have routinely been set aside for white men. This has always been the nation's custom. Until the 1960s, it was also the nation's law.

So if we want to talk about achievements being tainted by racial preference, it seems only logical to start there. After all, every worthwhile thing African Americans achieved prior to the mid-'60s -- Berry Gordy's record label, John Johnson's publishing company, Alain Leroy Locke's Rhodes scholarship, Madame C.J. Walker's hair care empire, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams' pioneering heart surgery -- was done, not just without racial preference, but against a backdrop of open racial hostility.

By contrast, nothing white men have ever achieved in this country was done without racial and gender preferences. Affirmative action.

I know that will be hard for some folks to hear. I know it will leave some white brothers indignant. And I expect many recitations of ''up by my bootstraps'' and ''know what it's like to be poor.'' We all want to feel that we made it on our own merits, and it's not my intention to diminish the combination of pluck, luck, hard work and ability that typically distinguishes success, whether white, black or magenta.

On the other hand, there's a word for those who believe race is not a significant factor in white success: delusional.

UNLEVEL PLAYING FIELD

It is not coincidence, happenstance or evidence of their intellectual, physical or moral superiority that white guys dominate virtually every field of endeavor worth dominating. It is, rather, a sign that the proverbial playing field is not level and never has been.

My correspondents feel they should not be asked to respect the skill or abilities of a black professional who may or may not have benefited from affirmative action. They think such a person should expect to be looked down upon. But black people have spent generations watching white men who were no more talented, and many times downright incompetent, vault to the head of the line based on racial preference.

So, here's my question:

Would African Americans be justified in looking down on white professionals? In wondering whether they are really smart enough to do the job? In questioning their competence before they had done a thing?

Yeah, you're right. That would take one hell of a nerve.

© 2003, Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I guess I'm obligated to be offended by this new board game. After all, Al Sharpton says I should.

And not just Rev. Al, either. Many other people -- including NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and radio host Tom Joyner -- have pronounced themselves offended by the game. Not that I blame them.

It's called Ghettopoly, a take-off on Parker Bros. venerable Monopoly. Except that this game isn't about moving a car or a top hat around the board, buying properties and landing on Boardwalk after somebody has put up a hotel.

In Ghettopoly, your token might be a crack rock, a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor or a basketball, and your goal is to build crack houses while pimping ''hos'' and getting carjacked. The game reportedly features an image of Martin Luther King scratching the front of his pants and proclaiming, ``I have an itch.''

So, no, you won't find ''Ghettopoly'' under my Christmas tree. Nor does it break my heart that retailers have been pressured into removing it from their shelves or that Hasbro, which owns Parker Bros., last week filed suit against the game's creator, David Chang of St. Marys, Pa.

For all that, though, I am not angry at Chang, who seems more misguided than malicious.

15 YEARS LATE

To the contrary, it's the campaign against him that gets my dander up -- not because it's wrong, but because it's about 15 years late. I keep wondering where all this fury was when rappers like 50 Cent, Nelly, Ja Rule and Snoop Dogg first started pimping, drug-dealing and drive-by shooting all over the video channels.

Where were the boycotters when these people and others were creating the template that Chang drew from? Where was the moral indignation when African-American people were reducing African-American life to caricature?

Or is it just easier to raise rage against Chang because he is not black?

With a few isolated exceptions -- activist C. Delores Tucker, the Rev. Calvin Butts -- African Americans have been conspicuously silent as black music, once the joy and strength of black people, has detoured into an open sewer of so-called ``hard-core rap.''

The vast majority of that genre's practitioners are nothing more and nothing less than modern-day Uncle Toms, selling out African-American dreams by peddling a cartoon of African-American life unencumbered by values. It is a cynical, knowing act, promulgated by young men and women who get rich by selling lies of authenticity to young people, white and black, who are looking for lessons in blackness. They are as much minstrels and peddlers of stereotype as Stepin Fetchit, Bert Williams or any black performer who ever smeared black goop on his face or shuffled onstage beneath a battered top hat.

The only difference -- the only one -- is that Bert Williams and Stepin Fetchit had no other choice.

My personal theory is that black people of my generation -- I'm 46 -- have resisted speaking forcefully against this because, like all baby boomers, we are deathly afraid of appearing less than hip. But as I recall, our parents never worried about that. They understood their role to be not hipness, but guidance.

THE FRUIT OF FAILURE

I am of a generation that has largely failed that role, that turned ''judgment'' into a four-letter word. The fruit of that failure lies before us: an era of a historical young people who traffic in stereotypes that would not be out of place in a Ku Klux Klan meeting.

And I'm supposed to be angry at David Chang? I'm not. He's just a good capitalist, just regurgitating what he has been taught in hopes of turning a buck. My anger is not for the student, but for his teachers. And not just my anger, but my sorrow, too.

I'm not losing sleep worrying about what David Chang thinks of black people. I'm more concerned with what black people think of themselves.

© 2003, Miami Herald