How is this possible? How can this still be true? How in the hell, a lifetime after a little boy in Arkansas pointed to the black doll and said, "That's a nigger ... I'm a nigger," can we still have black children who think black and bad are synonymous?

Some of us clenched our fists and cried "Black is beautiful" in the face of a nation that had always told us you could be one or the other, but never both.

And for what? So that 40 years later, our children would still parrot media-derived lies of their own worthlessness? What's appalling is that many of the lies now originate with black people themselves.

That's not to let white people off the hook. The simple arithmetic of majority/minority means that under the best of circumstances, a child of color will always see fewer images of people like her in media.

And the white makers and gatekeepers of those fewer images have historically weighted them toward ineffectuality, hyper sexuality, native criminality and plain ignorance.

What's different now is that blacks are, themselves, often the makers and gatekeepers. And under our aegis the images have, in many ways, gotten worse.

To surf the video channels is to be immersed in black culture as conceived by a new generation, a lionization of pimps and gold-diggers, hustlers and thugs who toss the N-word with a gusto that would do the Klan proud.

A new generation, afflicted with historical amnesia, blind indifference, and a worship of filthy lucre dances a metaphorical buck and wing, eyes rolling, yassuh bossing, selling itself out, selling its forebears out. Most of all, selling the children out.

That's all well and good, but the moment you're able to understand that you've been lied to is the moment you bear responsibility for promulgating some truth in reply.

— Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him at (888) 251-4407 or via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

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