For as long as I can remember I have heard that racism is a white thing and that blacks can't be racist. But wonder as I might, I cannot figure out why anyone can even assume that racism is the exclusive domain of whites. The pure unadulterated truth is that racism is just as pernicious in the black community as anywhere else. For many years, blacks would have the rest of us believe that racism was a "white thing" but any thinking, sane individual would acknowledge that this is not so. To help prove my point, here are some of the lesser vile comments made about black conservatives or just blacks that think differently. The pejorative terms that are used below refer to people like Ward Connerly, Justice Clarence Thomas et al, to make the ludicrous statement that they are not "real blacks."

* At a recent national convention of the NAACP, Julian Bond, the chairman stated, "Ward Connerly is a fraud and a con man."

* Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights leader, called Connerly, " a house slave" because of Connerly's opposition to affirmative action.

* The late columnist Carl Rowan stated, "if you give Thomas a little flour on his face, you'd think you had [former Klansman] David Duke."

* Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco called Thomas, "a shill for the most insidious form of racism." He added that Thomas, "should be reduced to talking only to white conservatives and must be shut out" by the black community.

* Manning Marable, political scientist, asserts that Thomas has "ethnically ceased being an African American."

* Spike Lee, movie director, calls Thomas, "a handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom."

* Author June Jordan calls Thomas "a virulent Oreo phenomenon, a punkass and an Uncle Tom calamity."

* Late dean of New York Law School, Haywood Burns called Thomas, "a counterfeit hero whose ideals had crushed or forever deferred the dreams of millions of blacks."

* Julienne Malveaux, columnist told a television audience, "I hope [Thomas's] wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter, and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease - he's an absolutely reprehensible person."

* Former NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks denounces black conservatives as "a new breed of Uncle Tom and some of the biggest liars the world ever saw."

* Historian John Henrik Clarke calls conservatives, "frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation."

* The late Khalid Abdul Mohammad stated, "when white folks can't defeat you, they'll always find some Negro, some boot-licking, butt-licking, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkfied, pasteurized, homogenized Nigger that they can trot out in front of you."

Now the question that lies before us is simply this, why is this kind of slander acceptable from blacks and not whites? Is this not racism in black face or is it only relegated to white faced individuals? Why is the name Uncle Tom suddenly analogous to blacks who share different views and opinions? Why is it that in order to be considered a "real black" in certain quarters it means that you have to agree with the notion that every black is a victim and that "whitey" must pay for hundreds of years of slavery?

Depending on whom you listen to there maybe different responses to these questions but the real truth is this, blacks who believe as these individuals do are comfortable in their own victimization. It is much easier to paint Justice Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell et al with the same brush because they do not take part in the crying game. The crying game is as pernicious today as it was ten years ago. It raises its ugly and repressive head and sprays its venom over the most innocent among us who have been convinced that "civil rights leaders" know what's best for our community. Somewhere along the line it was decided by crying game blacks that anything other than a direct assault on the "other" is a direct betrayal of the black race. These professional civil rights leaders have made a name for themselves by disparaging conservative blacks and anyone else who: think that affirmative action is a setback to the black race; who think that the welfare system is nothing but modern day slavery; and who think that the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King is being eroded every day not by conservatives but by those who serve as a mockery of the civil rights movement. If we continue to listen to the crying game blacks we will only serve to hasten our death as a community.