Oh, Oprah!

Sweet Jesus on a Triscuit...not you, too. Now Oprah has joined that tired old band on that more fatigued bandwagon dedicated to the proposition that black folks simply get a bum rap on the Percepto-meter.

While lobbing softballs at Malcolm Gladwell regarding his book, "Blink", Oprah bit at the low-hanging fruit of "TV Portrays Black Men As Crack Dealers And White Men as Judges." Now, we have herein documented our own abhorrence of White Privilege and those who use it to their nefarious advantage. But at some point in the last 40 years, this argument has simply lost not only its luster, but the very core of its relevance. It has, in fact, become the latest Big Lie to justify bad behavior by African Americans.

You don't ever - and I mean EVER - see gay, white rapists pointing the evil finger of accusation and undue influence at the movie "Deliverance" as their reason why they won't brush, floss, or keep themselves pure from unwelcomed anal assaults on innocent tourists. But give an inch and they'll take an hour to suggest that I cross the street in midtown Kansas City to avoid a baggy-panted man who has gone to great pains to mimic the gang-bang look - just because I'm sub-consciously racist. Two words, Ms. Winfrey: Bull Shit.

Big, huge, steaming piles of bull shit for you and your uber-privileged social circle. Big piles of bull shit for your well-earned platform being used to peddle this tripe as social psychology or, worse, as valid explanation for rampant crime among the community that gave you to us all.

It would take reams of megabytes to list the ways in which you abdicated your obligation to the truth when it comes to portrayal of Blacks and Whites in The Media.

Whoopi Goldberg played a do-gooder nun. Oprah played a Stand-Up-For-Yourself-and-Change-The-World character every time she's hit the screen. Vondie Curtis Hall, Jesse Martin, Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, Tyler Perry, Sidney Poitier, Halle Berry, and others disprove the point easily enough. But perhaps the point needs sharpening for those who, like Oprah did today, stoop to cheap opportunism to lay the deeds of bad people at the feet of casting directors.

Grey's Anatomy alone features James Pickens as Chief of Surgery at Seattle Grace, Isaiah Washington as a pre-eminent Cardiothoracic Surgeon, and Chandra Wilson as lead educator of the star interns. Criminal Minds features Shemar Moore as an intelligent AND street-smart FBI profiler. Will Smith and Thandie Newton starred in The Pursuit of Happyness, a You-Can-Do-It movie if ever one was made. Mr. Perry's one-man tour-de-force as writer, actor, producer and director in Diary of a Mad Black Woman and its sequel should, himself, demand an apology from Winfrey and the hack author for whom she shilled today.

American Idol cranks out talented, together artists - both Black and White - annually. Dancing With The Stars' exposure of Emmitt Smith and Laila Ali should have inspired no one to shoot anyone (we shall here remain silent on our private urges while watching Heather Mills and Paulina Porizkova).

We have had consecutive Black Secretaries of State in the country, to say nothing of the plethora of Black legislators that populate the national and state levels. Oprah has, herself, raised the profile of the Black Author beyond what any publishing imprint could hope to do singlehandedly. We cry "FOUL!", therefore, when this woman who has only a fleeting memory of racism, from whom no one runs on the streets, and who knows no one from whom one would flee...fans the flames of non-existent excuses for the real problems that plague the Black community.

Bill Cosby is right. Oprah Winfrey is wrong. Dead wrong. You are who you are because of who you have chosen to be. Given the same past, the same experiences, the same opportunities - maximized or lost -the same parents, the same schools, the same finances... two or twenty people all have the absolute prerogative to choose a path that defies their provenance. To suggest that a 1970's pattern of Black Man-Bad, White Man-Good in the media explains today's disproportionately criminal behavior by a subset of the Black Community requires that we also assume the opposite portrayals to be equally effective at social engineering.

We must assume, using Oprah's and Blink's faulty rationale, that there are fewer Blacks committing crime, more Blacks entering college, less single-parent Black families, less drugs in the Black community, and a stronger emphasis on education and success in the Black community - SOLELY because of the easily proved increase in positive portrayals of successful Black people in the media.

Hogwash? Maybe. But certainly no more so than what Oprah peddled to the world today. And I didn't make several hundred thousand dollars or sell an equal number of books to be equally wrong. If I am.

And I'm not.