ON AMERIKKKA: 2000One of my favorite books is authored by one of my favorite persons. He is law professor, scholar, warrior, true brother, and sage Derrick A. Bell. He penned the classic Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism. (He also resigned from his tenured post at Harvard Law School in protest against its racist and sexist refusal to tenure any African female peers. Most of his equivalently renown black Harvard professors do not even date or marry black women...) Mr. Bell and his book will always hold sacred places in my heart. I am 35 years old. On August 10, I will be 36. With age comes wisdom. With wisdom, comes resignation. One of the things to which I am increasingly reconciled is the fact that racism is eternal. I am not hopeless. I am realistic. I understand that increasing interracial breeding is not synonymous with racial progress. No group of persons can ever cross the color line in bed as deeply or frequently as slave masters did for centuries. It is starkly evident that increased racial mixing has always only intensified racial hatred. (e.g. Read The Color Of Our Future by Farai Chideya.) Witness racial labeling that aims exclusively to describe black persons as more white, never the reverse. Witness the increase of white supremacist murderers, who try to blind the multicultural lusts of white women by murdering the multicultural objects of their affections. Witness the ever expanding eradication of affirmative action, the ethnic cleansing of the state of California, the whitewashing of television and films, etc..... As the global population becomes increasingly black and brown, white racism is becoming more rabid. This new breed of racism has moved beyond revisionist history to Jim Crow cyberspaces. Demands to forget the past have actually become brazenly arrogant and shockingly ignorant, total denials of the past, and its link to the present and future. Bondage has morphed from slave ships to crack laws. The permanent underclass has spawned from plantations to the prison industrial complex. Genocide has mutated from small pox-laced blankets into the Ebola virus. The overseers and slave catchers have been transformed into killer cops and toxic parole officers. Voter laws have been nullified by convict laws. The masters who ruled cotton and humans now reign over media empires and corporate wealth. The politicians who once legalized slavery now legalize the criminalization of poverty. The laws which once outlawed reading for blacks, now outlaw scholarships, medical care, and other social programs for blacks etc.... I often dream about the struggles of my eternal African ancestors. I often admire the country we have built beyond the legacy of centuries of their kidnappings, robberies and tortures. I love America deeply. But, I will never love Amerikkka unconditionally. Blind patriots are fools. Though the soil of this country is rich with the blood of my people, its grounds are increasingly cruel places upon which to walk... I recently relocated from Oakland, California to Little Rock, Arkansas because I find race relations, academic and occupational opportunities, and the cost of living to be superior here in the South’s most beautiful city and state. But, there is no racial utopia anywhere in the world. Racism is ancient and universal. Even in this city I have adored since I visited my grandmother via Chicago, Illinois as a child, I am never allowed to forget that racism is a global reality. Amerikkka’s racial legacy is crashing into the millennium as forcibly as some computer systems will crash into the Y2K bug. All life is filled with joy and pain. Both are eternally intertwined. The challenge of life is to balance these extremes. Just as I am certain that slaves KNEW Africans would someday be freed, even when they knew they would die in chains, so do I know that someday racism will be conquered. I also know that I will never live to see that victory. The world I inherited will be full of racists, gaybashers, sexists, elitists and various other murderous disgraces to God. I am proud to be an African warrior across oceans of time. I feel the spirits of African angels who guide and protect me always. It is they and our God who keep me going beyond the nightmare of my Amerikkkan dream. We are forever at war in Amerikkka. All wars must be fought. It is a karmic law of the universe. Even when some battles are doomed, warriors are compelled to keep fighting. Even when hope is minute, it must be kept alive, by any means necessary...So, I will see you on the front lines, where I remain entrenched in a world that hates all that I am: Truthful, powerful, African, female, lesbian, and undaunted.