Note to Michael Richards: God Don't Like Ugly

One of my greatest problems in life has been my logical mind. I am one of those people who tries to find the rationale behind everything. It's a self-defeating task, because there are some things, which simply don't make sense. As a black person who has spent the greater part of his living as an ethnic minority in the Western world, racial prejudice such as the comments recently made by Michael Richards are something that I have become all too familiar with.

I often ask myself why do people hate black people so much? The Catholic saint St. Thomas Aquinas once said about evil, when you get to the heart of it, there is nothing there. The same theory could apply to racism. There is no understanding behavior based on irrationality, fear and ignorance. Television journalist Tony Brown once remarked that black people should quit trying to understand racism, because it was a mental illness.

When you look at the reasons that people give for their prejudice they often don't stand up to serious questioning. People often cite one bad example, such as a black person mugged them or broke into their house, and they justify that as an excuse to stereotype an entire group of people. This kind of thinking is intellectually lazy to say the least. When you look at the crimes and misdeeds attributed to black people, they are minuscule compared to the atrocities committed by people of European descent. As an avid student of African history, I am aware that black people have had our share of tyrant such as Idi Amin and Mobutu Sesse Sekou. But their crimes are misdemeanors compared to the crimes of European leaders.

The history of Europe has been one of constant wars and genocides. The longest period of sustained peace in Europe was enforced by the American military, from the end of World War II to the Balkan War of the 1990s. Two of the leading mass murders in history, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, came out of Europe. Stalin actually exceeded Hitler's death toll, he is alleged to have responsible for about 20 million deaths, Hitler comes in at about 5 million. When you compare that to Idi Amin's death toll of about 300,000, you can see that he is a relative novice in the mass murder game.

Noone seems to ascribe the actions of Caucasian deviants such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson to white people as a group. For better or worse, black people are still often stuck with the guilt by association mentality. The actions of one of us are seen as indicative of a whole race, no matter the difference in ethnicity, education or class.
Listening to radio call in shows, I was surprised, but not shocked, to hear some people trying to downplay the incident as mere words. Words are very powerful; I know I make my living using words. In the case of Michael Richards, words expressed what was in his heart, and what we saw wasn't pleasant.

Michael Richard's comments brought up images of lynching and hate crimes which many ethnic groups still face today. Last month a white teen in Houston, Texas was sentenced to life in prison for assaulting a Hispanic youth while shouting white power slogans. The Hispanic youngster was hospitalized for three months after the attack in which he was sodomized with a plastic patio umbrella, slashed with a knife and doused with bleach. And not too long ago in Texas a black man was killed by dragged behind a vehicle.

The n-word is not a mere word, it carries a connation and has a history behind it. The fact that some self-loathing and ignorant black people use the word familiarly does not mean the word has lost its sting. Black Americans need to ask themselves why they are the only group of people in the world who use a racial epithet created by their oppressors to describe themselves.

One would try to walk away from the Michael Richards incident on a positive note. The best thing I took away from the incident is that the crowd left enmasse after he launched his tirade. Even though racism too often rears its ugly head, the Laugh Factory incident showed that most Americans will not going to take it sitting down.