Thank you for advising the blacks on how we can stop destroying ourselves (is it ourselves or society that we are destroying? you didn't make this clear) by internalizing racist attitudes. Do you suggest any particular methodologies for ridding ourselves of these most destructive tendencies? I'm sure it is as simple as you imply, and should take no longer than a 60-day cleansing fast. Please write back with your recommended methods; I'm dying to cleanse myself of this foul cynicism so that I may enjoy these last days before racism dies out completely. I want to be pure so that I may enjoy this utopia that will no doubt occur in my lifetime.

That there is no utopia should be apparent to all, but much of my understanding of black studies is based on the solid research of John McWhorter In Authentically Black, he maintains that "black ideology of the 1960s was sidelined by the triumph of the New Left among thinking whites." He attributes this for black thought being "bruised into a racial inferiority complex." Progress is not possible, therefore, until black thinkers become more independent of those who seek plantation workers to provide politically correct poverty pimps that serve their political purpose.

I do not seek to regulate anyone to perpetual ignorance, yet I can daily view the forces within the educational hierarchy that seek to do so. It is functional to warehouse urban blacks so that the best they can be is Wal-Mart assistant managers and military cannon fodder. Telling them how wonderful they are in the name of "self-esteem building" is the classic way to accomplish this self-underestimation.

I don't believe that whites can or should be the primary influences in the necessary shift of black attitudes from the self-destructive tendencies statistically evident. Instead I read Clarence Page, Leonard Pitts, Gregory Williams (not Clarence Thomas) and other moderate/conservative black writers whose works, I hope, will be more influential in shaping future society (not just black) than Ronnie Dyson, Earl Ofari Hutchison, Russell Simmons, and Tavis Smiley.

From McWhorter's Losing the Race:

"Victimology stems from a lethal combination of ...inherited inferiority complex with the privilege of dressing down the former oppressor. Encouraged to voice umbrage on one hand, and on the other hand haunted by the former oppressor's lie that black is bad, many African Americans have fallen into a holding pattern of wielding self-righteous indignation less as a spur to action than as a self-standing action in itself because it detracts attention from the inadequacies we perceive in ourselves by highlighting those of the other."

Could this be what is happening here? I inserted a brief family history only to establish credentials (in much the same way that others professed to being bussed during racial desegregation), not as a brag. Why am I being made the issue?